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WALTER RUSSELL “BOWIE 


RECTOR OF GRACE CHURCH IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK, AND FORMERLY 
RECTOR OF ST. PAUL’S CHURCH, RICHMOND, VA. 
AUTHOR OF ‘‘THE MASTER OF THE HILL,” ‘‘ THE CHILDREN’S YEAR,” 
‘*SUNNY WINDOWS,” ‘!THE ARMOR OF YOUTH,” ETC. 


6eé 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


1924 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 


Printed in the United States of America 





TO 
8 od eg 6 


This book is yours,—yet not for aught it gives, 
Yours rather for the gain it takes from you, 

Since what you are commends what it would say, 
And in your eyes is that which makes it true: 

For through the morn, or through gray mists of tears, 
Where courage led, your steady feet have trod; 

And those who watch that far look on your face, 
Know you have found the open ways to God. 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https J/archive.org/details/someopenwaystogo00bow' 


PREFACE 


I should like to believe that this book might 
justify its name. For I think as I write it of that 
multitude of men and women in our world to-day 
who are wistful for God, yet do not know how to 
find Him. Many of them imagine, in these times 
of much religious controversy, that old roads to 
Him have been destroyed, and they are fearful 
of any new ones. And some, especially of the 
younger generation, wonder whether there genu- 
inely is any reality of God at all at the end of the 
questionings men follow. ‘To both these groups 
equally—to the traditional believers distrustful 
of changing ideas, and to the restless questioners 
who are doubtful of even the most vital facts 
which religious tradition tells of—I would try to 
bring what seems to me the message of the truth. 
The pages that follow deal sometimes with mat- 
ters which have been much in controversy; but 
they are written never for a controversial, but 
always for a religious, end. They are meant to 
show that the ground of those modern concep- 
tions of science, of life, and of religion, over which 
alone our twentieth-century minds can easily 
move, do give firm footing for the advance of 
faith, and that the ways of our truest and most 
unfettered thinking are open ways which lead to 
God through Jesus Christ. W.R.B 


Grace Cuurcu REcTOoRY 
October, 1924. 










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CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. THE NEED OF RELIGIOUS CONVICTION. . I 


The popular distaste for religious formulations. 
The necessity for creedal certainties, nevertheless, and 
the value of religious convictions to-day, for: 
The preservation of moral integrity. 
The revelation of the spiritual beauty which is the 
spring of hope. 
The gift of courage. 


Il. THE REALITY OF GOD FOR PERSONAL EXPERI- 
FONTS eth ench & a 


I. Some reasons why, fon many Benples ie conscious- 
ness of God is dim: 


The child’s thought of God fades, and no ma- 
ture conception is equally vivid to take its 
place. 

The intricate self-sufficiency of our material 
civilization seems to make God unnecessary. 

The contradiction of evil to belief in a holy and 
loving God. 


II. How the difficulties already considered may be 
transcended: 
The reinterpretation of God into terms of our 
mature experience. 
The discovery of God as the spirit in the 
wheels. 
The answer of the Divine to the challenge of 
evil. 


III. The possession of God for the life of to-day: 
The power of faith in the living fact. 
God seen in the beauty of the world. 
God found in the common task. 
Human souls as the gateways of God. 


Tig ole. CHRIS DAs hari si geuive dling ah eu ait nt Gm 


I. The twofold aspect of tesa 

The intimate humanness of the disciples’ first 
knowledge of Him. 

The growing awareness of that in Jesus which 
no human measures could contain. 

II. The problem of the miraculous: 

The distinction between the event and the 
descriptions of it. 

The value of a reverently suspended judgment. 


ix 


sf CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
III. How shall we interpret to-day these two supreme 
beliefs concerning Jesus: 
The Resurrection. 
The Virgin Birth. 


IV. The immediate. religious significance of certain 
great Christian doctrines: 
The Incarnation. 
Salvation through the cross. 
The power of the risen life. 
The second coming of Christ. 


IV. THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


I. The vital religious consequences of he! coming ret 
the Holy Spirit: 
The experience of the disciples. 
Attempts to explain the experience. 


II." What the Holy Spirit may mean for life to-day: 

The inspiration of goodness: In work, in service 
for others, in courage beneath calamity. 

The Spirit of Truth, creating: Open-mindedness 
to appraise the unexpected, adaptableness to 
a changing intellectual challenge. 

The genius for constructive interpretation of 
the enlarging facts of life. 

The spirit of power. 


V. WHY BELONG TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH? 


I. The true simplicity of the church: 
In its origin. 
In its essential and continuing character. 
II. Some familiar indictments of the actual church 
and the answers to them: 
The “unattractiveness”’ of church people. 
The charge of hypocrisy and the honorableness 
of being a ‘‘ hypocrite.” 
The objection that ‘‘the church does not do 
anything.” 
III. The positive contributions of the church to the re- 
deeming forces of our civilization and life: 
The nurture of the ideal. 
The strength of the confidence which comes 
from Christian history. 
A gradual unifying of spiritual forces. 
The church as the body of Christ. 


PAGE 


140 


184 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


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CHAPTER I 
| 
THE NEED OF RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


IN various Christian communions of late 
there has been an extraordinary ferment of dis- 
cussion concerning what men ought to believe. 

It had been generally assumed that the mark of 
Christianity in this age was a comparative indif- 
ference to theology and a thorough preoccupation 
with practical service. Yet here of a sudden is 
an explosion of interest not only in theology, but 
in the categorical forms in which it is represented 
that theology must properly be cast. 

Nor is this discussion a matter of merely super- 
ficial emotion. Loyalties of the deepest and most 
passionate kind surge up into its expression. An 
extraordinary preacher stands in the pulpit of 
the old First Presbyterian Church in New York. 
Multitudes flock to hear him and find in his gos- 
pel a message that satisfies their souls. Yet a 
host of conscientious ministers and laymen in the 
Presbyterian Church are convinced that all the 
seeming work of righteousness which his preach- 
ing produces is blighted by a bad theology, and 
that the preacher himself ought to be silenced 
because of his unorthodox beliefs. The General 
Assembly of the Church has had as its most in- 

I 


SOME OPEN W-AYS' 10) GO 


tense concern the question as to whether Dr. Fos- 
dick shall continue to mount his pulpit stairs or 
be turned out of his Church doors. Nor is it 
among the Presbyterians only that division 1s 
sharp. In the Episcopal Church a Bishop puts 
forth a little book outlining the change and ex- 
pansion of his theology in a ministry of fifty years. 
The House of Bishops holds a meeting and pro- 
ceeds to set forth in emphatic fashion the strict 
idea of the majority of its members as to the 
limits within which theology must properly move. 
In other communions the so-called Fundamentalists 
have established their shibboleths, and in deadly 
earnest they would decapitate as ecclesiastical 
heathen all those who cannot pronounce their 
formulas. ‘The temper of this widespread theo- 
logical discussion is not always the same. Some- 
times it is as vehement and excited as though into 
the religious life of our own time had come a 
recrudescence of passions like those which made 
the Inquisition. Sometimes it is the deep intensity 
of a quiet and disciplined conviction. But back of 
all the discussion, there is a profound reality of 
concern. Thousands of Christian men and women 
see in the terms of the theological discussion—in 
the Virgin Birth, in the deity of Christ, in the lan- 
guage of the historic creeds—the symbols of their 
deepest faiths. Confusedly, but very genuinely, 
they are afraid that something which has been 
2 


REL CGO Ss. 6 ONVLe LOIN 


very precious to them is imperilled in a great up- 
heaval. 

Yet the curious fact is that, at the very moment 
when so many people within the Churches are 
engaged in theological discussions, the crowd with- 
out is plainly sceptical as to any worth which these 
discussions may have. It is true, of course, that 
the man in the street is interested for the moment 
in what the churchmen argue about. He likes to 
read the flamboyant headlines that tell of some 
interesting collision between ecclesiastical person- 
ages. Among other exciting features of the morn- 
ing news, he will accept with satisfaction the re- 
port of theological controversy. But his interest 
arises, not from the fact that it is theological, but 
from the fact that it is controversy. After a 
while, men outside the Church grow confused in 
the general tangle of arguments and the dust of 
dificult language which hides the real contention. 
So it results that at the very moment when many 
religious folk are deeply and earnestly engaged 
in trying to vindicate those forms of faith which 
seem to them of extreme importance, a great many 
of the people at large, instead of feeling that they 
ought to shape their religious creeds more posi- 
tively, are feeling rather that, in the midst of so 
much which seems to them confusion, it is im- 
possible for the average man to find out anything 


3 


SOME OPEN WAYS POVGOD 


definite, and that there is no particular necessity 
for him to try. 

If we should try to analyze more particularly 
this reaction which is so often characteristic of the 
crowd outside the Churches, we should find that 
in their mind there are two considerations at least. 

In the first place, people are thinking that the 
discussion about creeds simply distracts by all sorts 
of needless questionings the attention which had 
better be fixed on the plain business of respectable 
living, which goes along better without too much 
theological dissection. They remember the whim- 
sical verse 


“The centipede was happy quite 
Until the frog in fun 
Said, Pray which leg comes after which? 
Which raised his mind to such a pitch 
He lay distracted in the ditch 
Considering how to run.” 


“What difference does it make,” says someone, 
‘what a man says that he believes so long as he 
goes ahead doing the best he knows how?” “Ex- 
actly what I say,” replies his neighbor, “if a man 
is conscientious and does his duty, beliefs don’t 
matter much, one way or the other. If he stops 
bothering about the things he does not understand 


4 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


and simply tries to go straight, he will probably 
land where he ought to be.” 

That is one reason for scepticism as to the im- 
portance of religious formulations. Also there is 
another and deeper reason which lies back of the 
first. 

Not only are many people impatient of any 
attempt at trying to understand what religious 
dogmas mean; but they are doubtful about the 
value of those dogmas, even if they did fully un- 
derstand them. They know that men have always 
believed in God; but with the world as it is, does 
belief in God make any very great difference in 
a man’s way of living and in the results which 
his life achieves? They know that for many 
centuries millions of people have worshipped in 
the name of Jesus Christ. But has Jesus Christ 
a message which is practicable in the twentieth 
century? Arguments about the Virgin Birth or 
some other article of the Apostles’ or the Nicene 
Creed seem to large numbers of people nowadays 
to be mere gesticulations not very relevant to the 
more essential matter. It is not a question now 
of whether they are right or wrong, but of the 
fact of what they think; and it is a fact that thou- 
sands of men and women are indifferent to creedal 
affirmations, not because they question this or that 
detail, but because they are dubious as to any 


5 


SOME OPEN WAYS) GOMGI 


actual dynamic value in the most fundamental con- 
victions which the creeds express. 

Notwithstanding, with full recognition of these 
facts, I stake the message of this book upon the 
affirmation that it does make a tremendous dif- 
ference what a man believes, and that it does 
make an equally tremendous difference that he 
should come to believe those great proclama- 
tions of religious faith which Christianity has 
always taught to be essential to his soul’s health. 
There are some Christian convictions which would 
be argued about the less as they are understood 
the more; and what I want to do is to lift some 
things up out of the dust and confusion of con- 
troversy, to set certain facts in the light of today’s 
sunshine, and to show why the Christian faith 
must be laid hold of and how it may be conceived, 
in order that it may be the power of life in this our 
present time. 

To begin with, then, about that centipede. It 
sounds plausible to say that the trouble with us 
is that we are getting our minds into a whirl with 
various speculations, when what we had better 
do is to go and take the next step without bother- 
ing our brains as to ultimate principles and under- 
lying explanations. Many of us say things like 
that very glibly. We play with the phrases which 
happen to be popular in our generation. We blow 
them out like feathers down the wind; but if we 

6 


RELLGIGUS: CONMIG DION 


really dare rest any weight upon them, they come 
down promptly enough to the ground, and we with 
them. We may not have to be considering at 
every moment which leg comes after which; but 
if we do have to get anywhere, we have to stop 
and consider where both legs are going to. How- 
ever it be with a centipede, it is certainly true with 
a man that he will stay in the ditch permanently, 
so far as his life’s achievements are concerned, un- 
less he determines what his life’s movement is 
about and what direction he intends to move in. 
From the very start—if there is to be any start— 
he has got to believe in something. He must be- 
lieve, for example, that effort is better than stag- 
nation. He must believe that it is better to try 
than not to try. He must believe that one thing is 
better to try for than another thing. So little by 
little his life builds itself up out of creeds,—that is 
to say, out of the definite and practical beliefs 
which become the mainspring of his daily choice 
and action. 

Plainly, also, it will make a difference to a man’s 
neighbor to know what that man believes, and 
what are the general lines along which he may 
be trusted to move. Here he is today. But what 
are the general principles which govern him, by 
which his neighbors may know where they will 
find him tomorrow? For even the most practical 
purposes of mutual relationships, it may be far 


7 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


more important for a man’s neighbors to know 
what he thinks and what he believes in than to 
know what he possesses. It is more important for 
the landlady to know that her lodger has a belief 
in honesty than it is for her to know that he has 
money in his pocket. If he has money but no 
creed of honesty, his money will do her no good: 
But if he has no money and does have the fixed 
belief that honesty is right and that honesty is 
authoritative, he will somehow get the money, and 
she will get it too. 

Let us be candid with ourselves, then, and admit 
that there is a great deal of loose talk about the 
uselessness of religious belief which is talk and 
nothing else. We do need creeds, and none of us 
could get along without them. Without creeds 
our own individual lives would be like so many 
tumble-bugs and beetles, buzzing and turning and 
getting nowhere; and without those great central 
convictions and governing principles which men 
mutually acknowledge, society, which has been 
built up by the growth of just such creeds, would 
disintegrate into chaos. 

At this point, I know very well that someone 
will rise up to reply. He will declare, “"What you 
have said is all very well, and all very obvious too. 
Nobody objects to that. Everybody admits that 
there are certain necessary principles of morality 
and decent living, of straight purpose and clear 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


choice, which men must follow. If you choose 
to call these things creeds, then it is plain enough 
that to this extent creeds are necessary; but it is 
a mere paper argument which identifies principles 
such as these with the kind of dogmas theologians 
talk about. Of course people have got to have 
some kind of belief in something. But what has 
this to do with the question as to whether there 
is vital importance in those particular beliefs 
which Christian teachers insist upon?” 

That is a fair question, and it is not to be evaded. 
Because a man believes something, you cannot by 
that fact alone persuade him that he is bound to 
believe something else. He may be convinced 
that he must be better than a beast or a bug; but 
he may not thereby be convinced of the nearness 
and sufficiency of God, who will help him to be 
something very different from the common run 
of men. To face this further question and present 
a Christian faith for today in the light of it, is 
exactly the purpose of what I am writing. Only 
an answer cannot be given in a paragraph. It 
must be given in everything that follows. Not 
long ago, when I was preaching the same message 
which is written in this book, I had a letter from a 
man who asked me please to answer for him “in 
two or three lines, how to attain everlasting life.” 
I had to reply that it would take a lifetime of 
obedience to find that out, and that to tell about 


9 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


‘t in two or three lines was beyond me; but that, 
if he kept on following in the way of Jesus, think- 
ing, desiring, living, according to His leadership, 
he would learn. That is what I also believe about 
the general question of our religious doctrines. 
It is true that men’s lives, in order to reach their 
best, need not only the obvious everyday convic- 
tions which most moral people recognize, but need 
also those more radiant and abundant beliefs 
which come only from the wider horizons of the 
thought of God. What may we believe about 
God? What may we believe about Jesus Christ? 
About God’s Spirit within us? About the Church? 
These are the definite questions we are to con- 
sider in the next chapters. But first in this chap- 
ter we must entrench more firmly the fundamental 
realization that, in addition to the everyday ideas 
of workable behavior which common sense might 
arrive at, we do need the convictions which are 
confessedly religious. We must learn that, for 
gallant and effective living, there is need of a kind 
of inspiration which cannot come to us until our 
sense of reality reaches on to include the fulness 
of God. 

Specifically then, let us consider some of the 
reasons for which it may be fairly claimed that to 
carry on creditably this plainest business of living, 
we need no less a creed than that which presently 

10 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


shall reveal at the heart of it the meaning of God 
in Christ. 


To begin with, there is the fact, rather stagger- 
ing to our complacency, that our everyday integ- 
rity requires a richer creed than some of us have 
imagined we could get along with. There are 
sions that even our common decencies will disin- 
tegrate if men imagine they can build on principles 
which have no underlying religious sanction. 

A short while ago, the front pages of the metro- 
politan newspapers were filled day by day with the 
reports of the Congressional investigation into the 
oil concessions. That absorbing interest has 
drifted now off the front page into the background; 
but it cannot have faded out of the recollection 
of our American people,—and if it should fade 
out, that fading would be a deeper indictment of 
our general moral status than was the original 
wrong. Here has been a deep and disgusting 
scandal with its ugly ramifications reaching out 
in many directions to touch this public man and 
that with discredit and to strike the nation with 
a sense of humiliated disillusionment as to the char- 
acter of American public men. In an issue of 
Life, there recently appeared a sardonic car- 
toon, showing the scrapping of Washington. The 

II 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


capitol was being hauled off on trucks in one direc- 
tion, the Washington monument hoisted into an- 
other, and the White House, sold to the highest 
bidder, carted away in a third. In a field there 
was set up a huge advertising bill-board, reading 
as follows: ‘‘For Sale——a lot of junk. Ideals of 
moral responsibility, public stewardship, and other 
old stuff, going cheap.” 

Why were these things going cheap? Wood- 
row Wilson expressed it in a sentence from the 
last message which he wrote for publication in his 
lifetime: ‘The sum of the whole matter is this, 
that our civilization cannot survive materially un- 
less it be redeemed spiritually.” The trouble with 
us is, as the whole scandal in Washington has 
made dismayingly evident, that too many men have 
no firm convictions of anything. They have no 
principles on which they can stand unshaken, when’ 
the thrust of temptation suddenly imperils the 
respectability which had been built on sand. 
When men follow expediency, and, having lost the 
eternal sanctions for right and wrong, make their 
ideas of conduct the mere by-product of materialis- 
tic shrewdness, then firmness and stability have 
gone out of them. As Franklin K. Lane wrote to 
a friend in Europe in that year of weariness and 
spiritual depression which followed the end of the 
war: 


I2 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


“This whole damned world is damned because 
it is standing in a bog. There is no sure ground 
under anyone’s feet. We are the grossest mate- 
rialists because we only know our bellies and our 
backs. We worship the great god Comfort. We 
don’t think; we get sensations. The thrill is the 
thing. All the newspapers, theatres, prove it. 
We resign ourselves to a life that knows no part 
of man but his nerves. We study reactions in 
human beings and in chemistry—recognizing no 
difference between the two—and to my great 
amazement, the war has made the whole thing 
worse than ever. If you have a religion that can 
get hold of people, grip them and lift them—for 
God’s sake come over and help us.” And to an- 
other friend he wrote, again of the need of re- 
ligion: “If we can get that sense we can have a 
new world. I do not believe we will change this 
world much for the good out of any materialistic 
philosophy or by an shifting of economic affairs. 
We need a revival—a belief in something bigger 
than ourselves, and more lasting than the world.” 


The revival which Franklin K. Lane wrote of 
must begin with the individual. We shall not have 
a finer standard of honor and service in our pub- 
lic life or in private business either until individual 
men are mastered by those fine motives which 
through all the centuries it has been abundantly 
evident that Christianity can repeatedly furnish. 
Certain it is that religion has been able, and still 
is able, to remould and transform the inner char- 
acter of men, giving soundness where there has 


13 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


been unsoundness, strength where there had been 
weakness, unfailing honor and faith where there 
had been cowardice and evasion. We need that 
remaking of individuals now. As C. E. Mon- 
tague has written in a striking volume of Essays 
entitled ‘“‘Disenchantment”’: 


“You remember the little French towns which 
the pestle and mortar of war had so ground into 
dust, red and white, that each separate brick went 
back at last, dust to dust, to mix with the earth 
from which it had come. The very clay of them 
has to be put into moulds and fired again. To some 
such remaking of bricks, some shaping and hard- 
ening anew of the most elementary, plainest units 
of rightness in action, we have to get back. Hum- 
drum decencies, patiently practised through mil- 
lions of undistinguished lives, were the myriad 
bricks out of which all the advanced architecture 
of conduct was built—the solemn temples of 
creeds, gorgeous palaces of romantic heroism, 
cloud-capped towers of patriotic exaltation. And 
now, just when there seems to be such a babble 
as never before about these grandiose structures, 
bricks have run short.” 


Of course, it is open for any man to say that 
these “humdrum decencies” of which Montague 
speaks can be built without any divine influence of 
religion. They can be built, one may think, by the 
united pressure of a general moral expectation, 
whether or not the community have God in its 


14 


REE GLOUS ;C ON VIC TEOWN 


mind. Yet there is abundant evidence, both in 
our own time and in all the far record of history, 
that this is not true. You cannot make bricks by 
pressing together cold clay. They must be fired 
and hardened by heat. Similarly, there is a hard- 
ening of character that does not come until men’s 
spirits have been brought under that influence 
which comes from the flaming thought of God. 
Oliver Cromwell, disgusted with the kind of 
drafts which were first furnished him for his 
army, determined to enlist a different sort. So 
he said, ‘I chose me men who had the fear of 
God before their eyes and made some conscience 
of what they did. After that, they were never 
beaten, but they beat continually.’ The long 
testimony of human experience has not lost its 
weight. In every enterprise, and not least in those 
battles which men must fight against the undra- 
matic but most vital temptations of everyday 
business and politics, there is need of men who 
have the fear of God before their eyes, and who 
make some conscience of what they do. The kind 
of morality which is a mere reflection of the crowd 
opinion disintegrates under pressure. The in- 
tegrity which does not disintegrate must find its 
strength in that reverence for something bigger 
than oneself and more lasting than the world, 
which is the fear of God,—and in that growing 


i) 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


devotion to the beauty of holiness, through which 
the fear of God is lifted into the love of Him. 


IJ 


‘As we need a creed to preserve integrity, so also 
we need it to preserve our hopefulness. In order 
to keep life on any happy level, we must learn to 
see the world as at least potentially beautiful; 
and that means that all through its often sordid 
and discouraging facts we must have the ability 
to perceive the gleam of something which redeems 
the present facts through the possibilities of the 
divine. 

There are many influences in our day which 
make for cynicism. It is significant that the pres- 
ence of cynicism and the absence of religion go 
together. There is a class of writers who make 
‘t a cult of modern smartness to destroy the finer 
optimism everywhere. They talk in magisterial 
fashion of “getting under the surface of things.”’ 
They must not let anybody be content with what 
they call the sentimental appearances; and pretty 
much everything is sentimental appearance to 
them which does not lead back to dust and mud. 
As Ian Hay has whimsically said in one of his 
lectures: If this mordant school of interpreters 
had their way, they would make short work of all 
our fairy-tales. ‘Cinderella, for example,” they 

16 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


would say. ‘Who in common sense could read 
such stuff as that? Look beneath the surface and 
take her measure. She was a wretched little hus- 
band-hunter—that is what she was. Her sisters 
were two old maids with an inferiority complex, 
and the prince was nothing but an empty-minded 
bounder, who probably made his wife miserable 
all the rest of her days.” ‘That is what becomes 
of Cinderella, and that is what becomes of most 
of the rest of us at the hands of those critics of 
life who see no poetry in it because they translate 
everything into their own sour prose. They are 
forever burrowing down into the poor origins 
which life grows from instead of seeing it in the 
higher beauty of that which it is growing to. 
They see the garden as the worm sees it, crawling 
through his dark channels in the sunless earth and 
imagining a flower is nothing but the white, ghost- 
ly roots that strike down into the blackness. But 
the garden as it really is above its surface, the 
only garden that counts for the fully appraising 
spirit, the garden as the girl sees it who walks 
among its flowers, the burrowing critic does not 
Stele 

Yet why burrow? It is true that we may ac- 
count the garden of life in terms of its creeping 
roots, but we may also account it in terms of its 
aspiring flowers. We may judge it with the 
worm’s judgment, but also—instead—with the 


17 


SOME OPEN WAYS DLORGiOm 


judgment of one who helps its roses grow. And 
the determination as to the way we shall thus 
judge it depends chiefly upon whether or not we 
have any belief in those diviner forces that for- 
ever are making growing things climb above the 
surface into a fragrance and beauty which they 
are destined to attain. 

One of the chief troubles with our world today 
-s that it has lost that sense of hopefulness which 
comes from the conviction that life ought to be 
and can be made beautiful. A materialistic 
philosophy has twisted our heads backward and 
told us to look at the origins of life, as though 
these contained within themselves the only ex- 
planation of reality. ‘Look at what man came 
from,” says this philosophy. ‘He came out of 
beastliness and savagery. Human nature 1s 
nothing but a little more presentable variety of 
the nature of the brute. It is full of hate and 
ferocity and instinctive selfishness. That is what 
it has been, and that is what it is going to be, and 
so the practical man had better shape his calcu- 
lations accordingly.” But to try to negotiate life 
under the dominion of any such idea as that, as 
Studdert-Kennedy wittily has put it, “is like going 
out for a walk, looking back to the place you 
started from. If you do that, you will break 
your neck.’ You need to look to the place you are 
going to, and there is nothing that our world 

18 


Heol GLoOUss CONV b@ RIO N 


needs more than a hopeful confidence that there is 
something fine we are going to,—some far-off 
divine event to which the whole creation moves, 
and also some true measure of progress toward 
that far-off hope which faithfulness and goodness 
can attain today. 

At a large assembly of the League for Indus- 
trial Democracy not long ago, when the needs of 
our civilization were being discussed before a 
group of men and women accustomed to think 
of its economic and social problems, Glenn Frank, 
the editor of the Century, concluded an analysis 
of the perils of our present social order by say- 
ing that what we need is more religion. And 
David Friday, the economist and statistician, said 
that what we most need to recapture in order to 
correct our materialistic drift, is a larger influence 
of religion and of art. It was not accidental that 
these two things were put together. Art helps 
men to reflect the beauty of their world, that, 
looking up to it, they themselves may be refined, 
and that the multitude, looking up to the ideal 
which the artist has embodied, may be refined by 
that contemplation; but the beauty which is 
wrought into canvas or marble, is only a frag- 
mentary part of that influence which men need to 
make them feel that the world is a fair place. 
There must be the spirit which can touch the com- 


we, 


SOME OPEN ways TO GOD 


mon surroundings and the ordinary duties of 
every day with the light of a suggested beauty, 
so that existence, which otherwise might be a 
plodding and a discouraging thing, may have the 
morning sunlight breaking across its fields and the 
song of larks within its sky. In the long run, that 
‘nvincible sense of a beauty even among common 
things is not possible without the religious spirit. 
It requires the ‘award conviction which cries to 
itself, ‘“O worship the Lord in the beauty of holli- 
ness. O come, let us sing unto the Lord.” If we 
want to see in one vivid realization how different 
the world looks to the spirit which is filled with the 
sense of God, we need only look to the life of 
Jesus. He opened the doors into the undreamt-of 
universe that lies around our life. To ordinary 
men their world was largely made up of eating 
and drinking, of toil and uninspired drudgery, of 
the routine of common days with no glory break- 
ing through. But when He came, it was as 
though one said, “There is another universe which 
environs us as the ocean environs the little island 
in its bosom. Come out from under the covert 
of your trees that you may sce and hear it. All 
along the shore of life is its eternal music. Every- 
thing that lives and blooms is fed by the moistures 
that come from its far sweep. Out to its infinite 
horizons of adventure, it can lead your spirit 
20 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


on. Round your littleness is the largeness of 
God.” It needed no change of place or circum- 
stance for Jesus to feel and make His disciples 
feel this divineness in which, if we choose, we may 
live and move and have our being. He went 
along the common ways of Galilee. Men looked 
and said, There is nothing in the field except the 
insignificant lilies which are too familiar to be 
noticed. Jesus said, The field is full of the grace 
and glory of God. The disciples looked into the 
market-place and said, There is nothing here but 
a group of noisy children playing. Jesus said, 
The market-place is full of the innocence, the lift 
of the spirit, the blessed youthfulness out of which 
alone can be builded the Kingdom of God. A 
woman stooped to give a child a cup of water. 
The disciples passed on unnoting; but Jesus said, 
Here is the compassion out of which the redemp- 
tion of God is made. A woman of the streets 
came into the house of Simon the Pharisee and 
bowed at His feet. She is a sinful woman, said 
Simon. She is the open gateway for the incoming 
saintliness of God, said Jesus. In the last night 
in the upper room, He took water and a basin 
and girded Himself with a towel, that He might 
wash the disciples’ feet. It is the deed of a ser- 
vant, thought the disciples as they shrank away. It 
is the self-expression of the holy love wherein God 
oy 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


is most revealed, said the one disciple who in after 
years could see into his Master’s heart. The lily 
in the field, the water in the cup, bread and wine 
on the table, the towel of the servant—these be- 
came sacramental things, pathways of star-dust for 
angelic entrances, golden gateways for the coming 
in of God Himself. 

It is only as men and women become able to 
think of their world in some such way as that 
today that we shall be able to make it over. We 
do not lack the materials for noble civilization. 
In spite of the awful wastage of the war, the vast 
resources of the earth, and the accumulated power 
of human knowledge, are sufficient to build again 
a social and economic order in which all men 
might have room to live and grow. What we lack 
most of all is a genuine confidence in the worth- 
whileness of effort. The war has left many people 
wondering whether there is anything real in life 
except cruelty and selfishness. ‘They have seen 
the wretched confusion into which secret diplomacy 
and business rivalries and jealous antagonisms of 
national interests have led us. Is there some- 
thing better ahead to strive for? If there is not, 
we shall slip back into the kind of disgust and 
cynicism which are the paralysis of effort. If we 
are to go forward to optimistic living for the in- 
dividual and to confident reconstruction of our 
society, it will only be because men are lifted up 

22 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


in spirit to see that possible beauty which falls 
upon their world of striving from the light of 
their faith in God. 


Ill 


In the third place, we need religious conviction 
in order that men may bear themselves courage- 
ously even in those hours when all the beauty 
seems to have vanished from their world. For 
those hours of gloom do surely come. For every 
life there are times when there is a drab monotony 
about the things it must try to do, when there is 
no color of flags to float above its obscure moral 
struggles, and when duty must be followed with- 
out the drum-beat. But no principle of living is 
worth much unless it does provide driving force 
for these otherwise uninspired flats of existence. 
Vagrant emotions of many kinds may lift us to 
some fine thought or generous deed for an instant; 
but without the kind of continuing power which 
religion furnishes, these things are apt to evapor- 
ate in empty sentiment. Dwight L. Moody, with, 
his penetrating common sense, had the truth in 
mind in the reply he made to Wilfred Grenfell 
when Grenfell, then a young medical student in 
London, heard Moody preach in an evangelistic 
service and was moved to a new religious convic- 


tion. Months after that, he met Mr. Moody and 
23 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


told him how he had been stirred. This is what 
Moody said, ‘What have you been doing since ?”’ 
That is the question which comes to every man. 
If you have thought that life ought to be a fine 
thing, what have you been doing about it since? 
And can you do it without religion, which is the 
steadying touch of the hands of God? In his 
heroic service along the grim coasts of Labrador, 
of which all the world knows, Dr. Grenfell has 
exhibited in our modern time the power of religion 
to help men live gallantly and work unflaggingly. 
In his autobiography, he has written, “Whether 
we, our neighbor, or God is the judge, absolutely 
the only value of our religious life, to ourselves or 
to anyone, is what it fits us for and enables us to 
do. God’s ‘Well done’ is only spoken to the man 
who wills to do His will.’ And he wrote again, 
“Feeble and divergent as my own footsteps have 
been since my decision to follow Jesus Christ, I 
believe more than ever that this is the only real 
adventure of life. No step in life do 1 even com- 
pare with that one in permanent satisfaction. I 
deeply regret that I did not take it sooner. The 
decision and endeavor to follow Christ does for 
man what nothing else on earth can.” 

The power of belief in God is needed to keep 
men faithful to duty even when their attempted 
faithfulness seems for the time to end in nothing 
but disaster. As long as the skies are fair, any 


2.4 


RELLGiIOUS) CONVICTION 


man with a sturdy moral purpose can go ahead 
with honor, but it requires an ultimate religious 
passion of conviction, whether through fair 
weather or foul, whether through success or long 
postponement and humiliation, to cleave to the 
brave attempt when every evidence of the world 
points derisively against it. ‘The confused and 
sometimes sordid facts of our actual world may 
shatter the expectations which the good man 
would seem to have a right to. Those who ought 
to be friends are indifferent and selfish, and false- 
hood finds its sinister ways to combat the noble 
thing it fears. Love may stand helpless before 
stubborn ingratitude and the locked doors of a 
wilfull heart; truth may knock in vain at the gates 
of sullen error; courage and generous service may 
find themselves assailed by treacherous foes; the 
cause which ought to have succeeded languishes; 
the crusade that lifted its lances into the sunlight 
of the morning rides down into the vale of some 
disastrous overthrow. Then comes the tempta- 
tion to believe that effort has gone for naught. 
All things continue as they were from the begin- 
ning. What has been the use of inspiration and 
of effort? The brief day of the best that one 
could do draws to its end, and little is there to 
show for what has been attempted. What is there 
but futility in the best that one has tried to be 
and do? 


25 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


Then back of that sense of immediate failure 
there can rise the consciousness of the background 
of God. What He can do, what He will do, is 
not measured by the apparent result of the 1so- 
lated human effort. What any life has tried must 
be set in relation to the far sweep of His thought 
and plan. Grandly and unperturbed His purposes 
move on to their fulfillment. He is not troubled 
nor in haste, nor need men be. The tides may ebb 
and flow, but the strength of God which works 
through all faithful living is like the upheaval 
of the continents which slowly through the ages, 
yet with infinite certitude, lifts the firm land above 
the sea and widens the margin of safety on which 
the feet of the coming years may go. 

If we should seek an illustration of this faith 
in the vindication of God which rises superior to 
all temporary disaster, we could hardly find a- 
better one than in that life, which, next to the life 
of Jesus Himself, has been the greatest force in 
making Christianity what it is. Paul, the apostle, 
who originally had been one of the powerful 
leaders in the official ranks of Judaism and then 
had become a missionary of the Gospel of Christ, 
went out to execution from a prison at Rome. 
There were those who would hear the news about 
him with contemptuous satisfaction. He was the 
man who would turn the world upside down. 
Well, the world was not ready to be turned up- 

26 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


~ side down, and so to their minds his life had the 
usual climax which the enthusiast may look for- 
ward to. He lived to be discredited and to die 
in obscurity. Doubtless the elders in the city of 
Tarsus from which Paul had come, shook their 
heads with sage regret. It was too bad that Paul, 
with all his possibilities, could not have had a little 
more sound sense. If he had not chased dreams, 
he might have succeeded, instead of coming to 
nothing, as very obviously he had. 

The news filtered through also to the little con- 
gregations of men and women to whom Paul had 
preached in many cities of the great Roman civili- 
zation of that day. They met together in Corinth, 
in Thessalonica, in Athens, in the towns of Gala- 
tia, and heard the tidings with a hush. It did not 
seem possible that he could really be dead, he who 
had once been so full of flaming life. ‘They re- 
membered when he first came to them, ardent with 
his message. He preached to them of hope. Lis- 
tening to him, they forgot their poverty and their 
need. They forgot the oppression of that hard 
Roman world in which they dwelt, with all its 
weight of suffering, and its old legacy of war. 
They saw the vision grow of a better kingdom of 
mankind made into a brotherhood, where there 
should be justice and peace in the love of Christ. 
Paul had meant all these things to them, and Paul 
was dead. Now that he was gone, was the dream 


27 


SOME OPEN WAYS) GOWG Gap 


gone too? Would there be any real betterment 
for their world, after all? 

But in contrast with all these groups who 
thought of him with contempt, or with regret, or 
with wistfulness, study Paul himself. Death 
opened those prison doors and looked in to find 
no broken figure, but to find instead a soul with 
all its high confidence gathered into triumphant 
strength. He had not been thinking of defeat, 
but of victory. He had not been thinking of 
failure, but of achievement,—and this in spite of 
the fact that the ordinary reckoning saw little 
sign of anything that he had achieved. He did 
not leave anything behind him. There was an old 
cloak, it is true, which he mentions in his letter 
to Timothy, some books, and a few parchments. 
Beyond these things, heirs had no concern about 
his possessions. His concern was in another realm 
of realities altogether. He had given his life to 
a cause which was mightier than any visible ex- 
pression of it. He had laid hold of an eternal 
thing, and therefore neither it nor he could fail. 
And the history of his influence for these nine- 
teen hundred years is the witness that he was not 
mistaken. 

As we remember the words which Paul wrote 
we can understand why it was that he knew he 
could not fail. I have fought the good fight, he 

28 


RELIGIOUS CONVICTION 


said. I have finished my course. I have kept the 
faith. 
Kipling in one of his ballads says: 


The race is run by one and one 
And never by two and two. 


But life’s race, as a matter of fact, is run by one 
and one and also by two and two. There can be 
no fine achievement for any individuals, nor for 
families, nor for nations, except in so far as the 
single lives, each in its own lap of the relay, do 
give the utmost ounce of effort required of them 
to carry the torch of truth and honor and service 
forward in the progress of their time. Yet with 
this goes the correlative truth that with no indi- 
vidual are the ends of the whole race exhausted. 
If one has done his best, he is not defeated though 
he fall. If only he has finished his course, he has 
thereby launched on its way the life that waits on 
his for inspiration. He may not be there to see 
when and how the race is won. His eyes may 
not reach forward to the finish line. When the 
long progress of the soul of man comes to its 
climax, and the flags of God are hoisted to hail 
the triumph of the victors, it will not greatly mat- 
ter though he have fallen spent at the end of his 
partial course. He too is part of the ultimate 
victory, and in the great spiritual awareness of 


29 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


the ultimate things he already knows it. That 
was why Paul in the prison knew that his race was 
not in vain. Other hands should take the torch 
which he passed on. Other feet should set forth 
on the track of the purposes of God because the 
contagion of his heroic beginning was passed on 
to them. There are those in high place who start 
for some great goal that waits within the gift of 
God for the achievement of our human race. 
They may fall; but before they fall, they have 
touched their comrade in the coming relay, and 
they have not failed. They are spent, but the race 
is sped. And less dramatic lives there are of 
whom the same is true. When men are discour- 
aged because they know that some true thing they 
set out to obtain will never be reached within 
their own experience, when they are conscious that 
the best things they have striven for are still far 
beyond their reach, and that their strength wanes 
and the time is short,—still may they take heart 
again and keep on in faithfulness on all the way 
which God has marked for them; for there at the 
end of it wait the runners who shall take up the 
brave incentive which their lives pass on. There 
are the dreamers of another generation waiting 
to be set free. There are the high hopes of to- 
morrow reaching out for the touch of their faith- 
fulness today. 

So the heart of courage which religion gives 


30 


REE BO LOS AC GENIE EC Ou 


may still beat invincibly in the midst of weariness 
and seeming defeat. That was true of the great 
apostle to the Gentiles. It was true in so vivid 
a measure that it needs no pointing out in the 
case of the life of Jesus. It can be true with all 
lives. The prophet Isaiah rightly shaped his 
words to their climax when he wrote of those 
who, being touched by the spirit of God, “shall 
mount up with wings as eagles, shall run and not 
be weary, shall walk and not faint.” It is the 
long, hard pull that counts, the steady pressing on 
when life is too bruised to fly, too weary to run, 
and can only take one painful determined step at 
atime. Then in the midst of discouragement the 
man who looks to God is still undaunted. 


“It fortifies my soul to know 
That, though I perish, Truth 1s so: 
That, howsoe’er I stray and range, 
What’er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 


That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.” 


31 


CHAPTER II 
THE REALITY OF GOD FOR PERSONAL EXPERIENCE 


Nor long ago-.a caravan started across the 
Sahara Desert to find the oases of Kufara, to 
which very few Europeans had ever penetrated. 
It was a hazardous adventure, and one which must 
end disastrously unless across the desert the right 
track were followed which would lead without 
unnecessary delay to the oases. Day by day the 
caravan went on over the blistering white sand 
of the desert. The water which they had brought 
with them failed. They began to suffer the in- 
creasing agonies of thirst. At length, some of the 
caravan, their throats on fire, their tongues 
swollen, half delirious and wholly spent, staggered 
and fell in the sand. It seemed to them useless 
to keep up the agony of effort. The desert ap- 
peared to stretch with mocking emphasis on every 
side. They never could reach the oases. Perhaps, 
after all, there were none to reach. But one man, 
the guide, hardened himself against despair. The 
oases did exist, he said. They must be near. So 
he pressed on over a swell of the desert sand, and 
as he surmounted it, there before him lay the 
green paradise of the wells of Kufara. Because 
he believed, in the face of contrary appearance, 
‘n the face of doubt and seeming disaster, he 


32 


Per EO AST Y- )O:-Be, GOD 


achieved for himself and for others the life-saving 
Pact, 

When Columbus set out in his tiny vessels from 
the port of Spain to find a new way to the Indies, 
he unfurled the flags of his adventure in the face 
of a world that mostly viewed his whole imagining 
with a scornful disbelief. Out’ into the trackless 
ocean, never dared before, he pointed his prows. 
Doubtless the men who went with him, drawn from 
the daredeviltry of Spanish seamanship, were not 
lacking in courage and resolution; but as the days 
went on, and the awful loneliness of the empty 
horizon still stretched before them, they grew 
mutinous. They thought that they were sailing 
with a mad adventurer on to death. Columbus 
himself had no proof that he could give them 
which had been drawn from any other man’s ex- 
perience. No living soul had ever crossed those 
waters before. Upon nothing but his own intre- 
pid conviction could he stand. Nevertheless he 
clung so unflinchingly to his belief that these west- 
ern paths, if followed to the end, would lead to 
the reality which his imagaination had told him 
must be true, that he held to his course and com- 
pelled his crew to follow. Because he did so, the 
gates were opened to the mighty continent which 
had lain undiscovered till he showed the way to 
find it. The whole earth was suddenly enlarged 
because this man followed his dream. The mighty 


35 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


spaces of the western world, which before that 
time had lain as though non-existent, out of the 
ken of civilization, suddenly became the heritage 
for the expanding life of man. 

Which things, as the New Testament might say, 
are an allegory. Here are illustrations of the 
fact that a deliberate conviction in that which is 
still unseen and unproven and a resulting shaping 
of the will in terms of that conviction may make 
the difference between success and failure and be- 
tween life and death. Follow that illustration into 
the realm of religion, and we understand the cru- 
cial value of that instinctive sense of a reality as 
yet unseen which leads on to the discovery of God. 
Without God, our spirits may be like vessels on an 
empty sea or like the caravan bewildered in the 
desert. To the mind unlighted by religious faith, 
there may be no reality beyond that which the im- 
mediate experiences suggest; but if God does exist 
as a fact beyond the borders of the uninspired 
consciousness, then it is infinitely tmmportant to 
know it, for the discovery of Him may be like the 
discovery of a new continent in which the life of 
man finds the splendor of its more spacious oppor- 
tunity, or like the discovery, in the midst of what 
otherwise would be the desert, of the great oasis 
with its wells of life. 

Most people will admit the importance of God 
and the need of God. Blatant and deliberate 


Ass 


ila Beek A WV Y, 2OVR GOD 


atheism is rare. Men are willing to acknowledge 
possibilities beyond what they or their neighbors 
may have laid hold of, and will say like Hamlet, 
“There are more things in heaven and earth, 
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 
But though thus men do not deny that God may 
be, the trouble with our time is that many con- 
fessedly have not found Him. They are conscious 
that He might be a fact of immeasurable signifi- 
cance for their living if once they became aware 
of Him; but they are not aware of Him. Many 
Christians acknowledge this inwardly to them- 
selves, even when they stand in Church and say the 
mighty words, “I believe in God.” 


I 


Why is this? That is what we want to try to 
answer. If we can discover some of the reasons 
why the apprehension of God is difficult for many 
people today, we can more intelligently see our 
way to overpass the difficulties which block the 
road to faith. 

1. The first difficulty is the fact that most of us 
have grown up out of the child’s naive conception 
of what God is, and we have never attained any 
other, equally vivid, to take its place. Thought is 
bewildered; for it knows it cannot conceive God 
according to the child’s imagery, and, having lost 


35 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


that, it has lost all definiteness of conception what- 
ever and gropes as ina fog. With the passing of 
the years, we grow out of the old thoughts of God, 
but do not grow into new ones, and land in empti- 
ness. Sometimes for men and women God has 
dropped as completely into the realm of the out- 
grown imaginations as has the old belief in Santa 
Claus. One day, shortly after Christmas, I met 
two little boys whom I knew, one of them about 
eleven and his small brother about five. I said to 
the older one, “I hope you had a fine Christmas.” 
“Well,” he said, “I did; but it was a lot nicer 
when I was young.” Already he had begun to 
grow out of the happy illusions which made the 
keenest thrill and wonderment of Christmas for 
him. Already the vision splendid had begun to 
fade into the light of common day. And this is 
true with the thoughts that have to do with God. 
For them, too, there is a time of youth, bright 
with the childish confidence, filled with all sweet, 
instinctive expectation; and then, it is as though 
the dream world were shattered before the hard 
thrust of maturer facts. A little girl of six and 
her tiny brother of three were heard conversing 
one day—and this also was at the Christmas sea- 
son—to this effect. Said the little boy: “Elisa- 
beth, wouldn’t you like to die?’ ‘To which she, 
being a matter-of-fact small person, replied en- 
phatically: “No. Why should I want to die 2’ 
36 


er Be Roe Ae al Ye Ose) GOD 


“Well,” he persisted, ‘‘wouldn’t you like to die and 
go to heaven?” ‘‘What do you want to go to 
heaven for?” said she. “Well, wouldn’t you like 
‘to go to heaven and play around with God and the 
angels and the little Christ-child?” he persisted. 
“Oh! He’s grown up long ago,” she answered. 
At which the little boy was much cast down. 

For heaven in his imagination was quite as vivid 
and real a place as his nursery filled with toys, 
and God and the little Christ-child quite as under- 
standable as his own father and as any little boy. 
‘To play around with God and the angels and the 
Christ-child,” seemed a very desirable way of 
spending the time, and quite as real and possible 
as anything else that might happen in his wonder- 
crowded world. 

But what have we grown-up people achieved by 
way of replacement for the child’s imagination 
of the unseen? For him there are no intellectual 
difficulties at all in thinking of God in that same 
close human way in which he thinks of everything; 
but the growth of knowledge inexorably takes the 
child’s mind, even as the other growth takes his 
body, out of the comfortable crib of the little ideas 
in which he lay so contentedly and played. The 
universe has expanded so immeasurably that we are © 
bewildered in the midst of its shivering immensity 
of space. Once it was so compact that it was not 
dificult to think of a God greater than any human 


37 


SOME OPEN WAYS LONGO 


being, and yet not removed from human likeness 
by any too vast degree. The earth was the centre 
of the whole creation, and above the blue arch 
of the sky, with the stars like torches at its gates, 
was the plain locality of heaven; but then to the 
minds of men accustomed to this limited and man- 
ageable universe came first the shock of the Coper- 
nican astronomy. Of a sudden the old conviction 
that the earth was the centre of all existence van- 
ished before the awful imagination of a solar 
system with its immeasurable distances, through 
which gigantic planets cruise, in comparison with 
which the tiny globe of earth is like a mote dancing 
in a ray of the sun. The old thought of heaven 
there above the visible firmament was rolled up 
like a scroll, and men’s eyes looked aghast into a 
vast emptiness between the uncounted stars. When 
Laplace said that he had searched the heavens 
with his telescope and found no sign of God, he 
was only expressing, from the somewhat cynical 
point of view of the man of learning, the doubt 
which the common man wistfully felt. God’s 
throne and abiding place seemed to have vanished, 
and the mind fainted before the awful distances 
through which it would have to try to follow Him. 

Later there came the discoveries of the geolo- 
gists and brought to the old ideas of time the same 
dislocation which had already come to the ideas of 
space. Whatever the immensity of the universe, 


38 


DHE RE AL ET Ye Ob GOD 


‘when men concentrated on the history of their 
own race on this planet, they found themselves 
back in the realm of a conception limited enough to 
be understandable. A few thousand years com- 
prehended the whole history of mankind from the 
Garden of Eden to the beginning of the Christian 
era, and the Old and New Testaments, and Chris- 
tian history, taking up the story where the New 
Testament left it off, if judiciously read, made plain 
the relationship of God with His human children 
from the definite beginning all down the well- 
marked way. But the geologists rolled back the 
beginning of history into a timeless void before 
which the imagination staggered; and swift upon 
the heels of the geologists came the new teachers 
of evolution with their conception of the rise of 
man out of primitive pre-human forms through 
a process in which the recorded history is only 
a little moment in comparison with the aeons of 
the unrecorded years. There vanishes then like a 
dream the simple picture of the Garden of Eden, 
vanishes too the thought of a God who created 
man and all the world he lives in, as though with 
visible hands, and in the cool of the day walked 
in the garden where He had placed the man He 
made. Before this new teaching many would-be 
religious folk who wanted to hold on to old con- 
victions and now did not know how, made doleful 
clamor. They said—and some say yet—that if 


39 


SOM EVO PEN OW ALY S. of OGD 


the evolutionists were listened to, God were as 
good as lost. If life developed in the way the 
evolutionists said it did and through the incon- 
ceivable time which the geologists claimed, then 
what would become of any thinkable idea of a 
divine creation? “Ihe very conception of creator- 
ship seemed to them to vanish, and along with it 
the Creator Himself. 

Of course it is true that other suggestions from 
philosophy and poetry came along to try to fill 
the void which the troubled religious conscious- 
ness felt. Men might try to be content, as Words- 
worth was, with 


‘‘A sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.” 


But it was, after all, a thin contentment. That 
thought of God might be all very well for a poet’s 
rhapsody; but it does not feed the actual hunger 
of the heart. Yet it is as much as many people 
possess. God is swallowed in His universe. He 
may “roll through all things’; but it is like the 


40 


MH aweAL LLY) OF) GOD 


rolling of a mist which takes elusive shapes and 
then is gone. 

That, then, is one reason why faith in God is 
vague for so many men and women now. We have 
put away childish things and have not yet won the 
more mature perception in their place. Before 
we can effectively believe in God, we must attain 
a thought of Him which will be adequate for our 
changed universe, and yet will be close and satis- 
fying for those same human needs which men feel 
now as surely as they did when intellectually the 
universe seemed so simple and so small. 

2. The second reason why it may be difficult in 
our time to believe greatly in God is because we 
live in the midst of a civilization so huge and self- 
sufficient that often it seems to make quite unim- 
portant the question as to whether there is any 
God or not. It would appear as though the sys- 
tem which we had created could take care of it- 
self. There is such multiplicity of physical and 
material causes producing the things we want that 
there may not seem any necessity of concerning 
oneself about a great First Cause who for practi- 
cal purposes appears to be very remote, even as- 
suming that He exists at all. 

In earlier and simpler times that, of course, was 
not true. When men lived closer to the primal 
realities, and no long chain of human intermedi- 
aries intervened between themselves and the 


41 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


sources of their life, they were conscious of the 
more immediate meaning of God. The great 
prophets often were men who dwelt in the desert. 
Of such were Elijah, and Amos, and John the 
Baptist. Moses did not come to Egypt ready for 
his leadership until he had passed his lonely exile 
in Sinai. David went down to the camp of Saul 
to fight Goliath from the solitude of his mountain 
pastures, where he was alone with his own 
thoughts and with his sense of the presence of 
God. Jesus came out of the little town of Na- 
zareth, and spent his life with men who lived close 
to the simplicities of nature—fishermen familiar 
with the daily hazard of the lake, tillers of the 
fields, carpenters, and other workers with their 
hands. When men thus do touch for themselves 
the basic things of earth—the soil with its fer- 
tility, into which they must cast seed in trust, wind 
and weather, the unpredictable changes of frost 
and heat, of sun and storm, then along with the 
consciousness of their own limitations there grows 
the sense of reverence for the ultimate power into 
whose presence they are brought. Standing upon 
the borderland of fact, they look across it into the 
realm of mystery with which their daily interests 
are brought into immediate contact, and it matters 
vitally whether in the midst of that mystery of the 
environing forces there is one whom they can call 
God. Whether the seed will grow, whether the 


42 


Tbh Reb Ade iD iy OW? GOD 


tree will blossom and the blossom ripen to its fruit, 
whether the lake will yield its fish, depends upon 
there being something friendly at the heart of 
things which answers to the need of man. The 
simpler man’s work is, and the nearer he comes to 
those original elements out of which all human 
production is built up, the less he can depend upon 
the manipulations of other men to bring him ad- 
vantage, and the more he perceives the prime ne- 
cessity of God. That is why there is usually a 
more instinctive sense of God, a sturdier and more 
native religious consciousness, among people who 
live in the open than among those who live in 
cities. No long train of artificialities stretches be- 
tween the results they work for and the sources out 
of which they come. You can explain a city by 
expatiating upon the restless energies of men; but 
you cannot explain that way the ripening of the 
grain, the silence of the winter snow, or the 
wakening magic of the birth of spring, the flight 
of the migrating birds, or the march of stars 
across the open sky. 

In our modern civilization, more and more in- 
dustrialized, men are removed from any fresh per- 
ception of those things upon which all work and 
the wealth of the world depend and begin to as- 
sume that the machinery which brings them the 
thing they want has somehow created it too. They 
buy their food in a market to which the railroads 


43 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


have brought it. They live in a house which some- 
body else has built. They wear clothes which have 
been woven on the looms of some distant factory. 
Nearly all of the products they consume come to 
them ready-made out of a process which seems to 
be everywhere material and nowhere spiritual. 
Let a man drop a piece of money in the industrial 
machine, and the intricate wheels of its exchange 
go round, so that, without further ado, there is 
delivered to him meat for his dinner, the suit of 
clothes for him to wear, the book for him to read, 
or anything else for which, for the price attached, 
he may choose to call. In this society which we 
have constructed, it would appear to be quite non- 
essential to a man’s success that he have any par- 
ticular idea about God, but very essential that he 
have an accurate idea of the way to relate him- 
self to the business machine. God helps those who 
help themselves, a man is told. The important 
thing, therefore, is that a man should help him- 
self. ‘The question as to what God will do, if any- 
thing, may be left to the pious aftermath of con- 
sideration in whatever time may be left after the 
practical matter is seen to. 

As matters stand with us, God very often does 
not appear except through some violent dislocation 
which makes a breach in our complacent order. 
Steamship companies print on their tickets refer- 


44 


EL Be Roe A TTY, OCF GOD 


ence to possible “‘acts of God,” by which they mean 
storm, fire, collision, and other unpredictable 
calamity, and give no indication that it may be 
the “act of God” which drives the turbine, and 
sets the compass, and illumines the intelligence of 
the captain who steers the ship. In the healing of 
the sick, we most of us depend completely upon 
the physician, and sometimes upon very materialis- 
tic medicine at that, and turn to God only when 
it is time for proper words to be said above the 
dying. The minister may be admitted a few steps 
before the undertaker. Too many of us are like 
the passengers on the vessel who, when the cap- 
tain told them that the storm had become so vio- 
lent that the ship was in grave peril and they had 
better go to their cabins and pray, said, ‘Oh, 
Captain, has it come to that?” In the story of the 
sinking of the Titanic written by one of the sur- 
vivors, it has been told that, when men and women 
stood on the decks of the stricken liner on that 
still winter night when the iceberg had stabbed her 
to her doom, and later, when those of them who 
had not gone down with the liner floated here and 
there on the empty sea in the life-boats, even those 
who were little accustomed to religious utterance 
kept saying the Lord’s Prayer and old hymns like 
“Nearer my God to Thee’; but while the proud 
ship was speeding on her way, it is likely that her 


45 


SOME OREN WANs TO G.@ia 


company were mostly quite satisfied with the suf- 
ficiency of that luxurious thing which human skill 
had built and human confidence had launched. At 
any rate, that is true of multitudes in the general 
environment of our elaborate civilization, except 
when some rare iceberg-thrust brings a sterner 
realization. We are prone to assume that the de- 
vices which materialism have created are so satis- 
fying and so dependable that there is no special 
incitement to go in search of God. 

3. The third reason why belief in God has be- 
come exceptionally dificult for many persons in 
our day is because of the contradiction to belief in 
a loving and sovereign purpose which is caused by 
the sufferings and the moral evils in the world. Of 
course these things have been part of men’s ex- 
perience from the beginning. But two factors of 
late have accentuated the difficulty. For one thing, 
there is the almost miraculous development of the 
means of communication, so that, to the alert in- 
telligence in any country of the civilized earth, 
there is immediately brought the news of what- 
ever critical event may happen in the world’s re- 
motest places. Until a little more than a century 
ago, men lived in very narrow circles of movement 
and of knowledge. They were in touch with the 
affairs of exceedingly small communities. In the 
years when America became a nation, it took from 


46 


erik baal IYO 5G Oi 


six to nine days for a letter to go from Boston to 
New York and anywhere from eight weeks to five 
months for mail to come from England to the 
United States by way of the sailing vessels that 
made their way as best they could against the 
storms and hazards of the Atlantic. Rough roads, 
muddy and sometimes all but impassable, were 
the only links of communication between the scat- 
tered settlements, so that the human awareness 
of men was provincial to a degree now difficult 
for us to imagine. The gravest convulsion, either 
of nature or of war, might break in one country, 
and by the time the news of it crept through to 
another people, it would have lost the vividness of 
immediate fact and become the chronicle of some- 
thing that had already drifted into the past; but 
in our modern times, the cable, the telegraph, the 
newspaper, and now but yesterday the radio, have 
brought the whole world to the doors of every 
man’s mind. Mount Etna breaks into eruption in 
Sicily, and while the smoke and fire of it are still 
lurid in the Mediterranean sky, men and women 
are reading of it in Boston and New York and 
San Francisco. It is not something over and done 
with, but an immediately contemporary fact which 
challenges, not only their attention, but their re- 
sponsibility for help. An earthquake shatters 
great cities of Japan, kills thousands and tens of 


47 


SO'MEE CO PRIN OW AWS) wl OnrG md 


thousands of their inhabitants and leaves a great 
population destitute, and immediately this thing 
lays hold, not only of the interest but of the re- 
sponsible conscience of all civilization, and the 
calamity becomes a fact upon which the active 
awareness of innumerable people is concentrated. 
Thus there is accumulated in the minds of men 
a mass of impressions which altogether cast their 
growing shadow over the belief which they might 
like to cherish in a loving God who holds the earth 
and its inhabitants in His keeping. The difficulty 
is made worse by that exaggerated perspective to 
which the circulation of world news is always sub- 
ject. The normal processes, both of nature and 
of human life, the quiet growth of harvests, the 
homely contentment of millions of families, the 
inconspicuous acts of human friendships, never 
get into the news, because they are the common 
things, taken for granted and assumed as a matter 
of course; but the calamities, which by the very 
fact of their singularity stab the attention wide 
awake, are broadcasted everywhere. Uncon- 
sciously the ordinary man falls a victim to this dis- 
torted emphasis. He hears so much of terror and 
distraction that the world may seem to him a ter- 
rible and ominous place. What he most often 
is led to think concerning God is destructive, at 
least to that sort of idea of Providence which the 


48 


Sides SO ABO Ch OL kG 0 1 


childlike mind may hold. He may come to doubt 
profoundly whether the evidence of the world 
gives any right to believe in the supremacy of the 
only kind of God one would desire. 

This process in the human mind was very 
marked during the years of the war. Of a sudden, 
all the normal course of things seemed to be 
swept into a maelstrom of darkness and destruc- 
tion. From all parts of the earth, from Canada, 
from far-off Australia and New Zealand, from 
India and from the United States, the youth of 
the nations, by the tens of thousands, went to die 
upon the battlefields of France. Everywhere 
there were empty homes. Everywhere the shadow 
of a dark anxiety shut down. Europe itself was 
shaken to its foundations and racked by the con- 
cussion of human passions worse than the dreadful 
concussion of the guns. Not only the mind of 
soldiers at the front but the whole spirit of great 
peoples was in a measure shell-shocked. ‘There 
was a cry, sometimes wistful, sometimes wild and 
blasphemous, ‘‘What has become of God?” “J 
have been a Christian all my life, but this war is 
a bit too serious. So saying,” writes C. E. Mon- 
tague, “a certain young army recruit had folded 
up his religion in 1914 and put it away, as it were, 
in a drawer with his other civilian attire to wait 
until public affairs should again permit of their 


49 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


use.’ And the greater question is as to whether 
the ideas of God and of religion which men may 
have had before the war and which they laid aside 
in face of the war’s contradiction have in many 
cases ever been got out again. Some have given 
up the effort at interpreting this distracted world 
of ours in religious terms. To their mind there 
does not seem to be any living God within it, or, 
if there is one, then they doubt whether He is 
sufficient for the task He has on His hands in set- 
ting a mad world right. 

Such, then, are some of the difficulties to re- 
ligious faith, some of them new to our time, some 
of them old, but now accentuated. Nevertheless, 
in the face of them, men are hungry for something 
they cannot find until they find God. It is true 
now, as it was true with Augustine, that a deep 
human instinct cries out to something within the 
unseen, ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, and our 
hearts are restless till they rest in thee.’ As Sir 
Philip Gibbs has written: 


“Yet, by a strange and tragic contradiction, 
there has been no time in modern history when the 
peoples of the old civilization have been so des- 
perately eager for spiritual guidance. There is a 
great thirst for spiritual refreshment among those 
in the dry desert of our present discontent. I find 
expression of that among many men and women 
not ‘religious’ in temperament nor of a sentimental 
type, but rather among cynics and realists. In 


50 


er tae Reba Ly) Oo be) Gor 


conversation, at the end of pessimism, they are apt 
to admit that ‘nothing can save us all but some 
new prophet of God.’ ”’ 


If 


One by one, therefore, let us take up the diff- 
culties which we have seen beset contemporary be- 
lief in God and consider by what ways we may go 
through them to the faith which may lie on the 
other side. 

1. We need a new conception of God. We 
have outgrown, as we saw, the naive, childish 
thoughts, and we must achieve something at once 
intellectually intelligible and humanly satisfying to 
take their place. 

It is well to remember that there is no occasion 
for dismay in the fact that this recasting of our 
ideas is necessary. That old forms of belief prove 
no longer tenable may be a sign not of death but 
of expanding life. 

As Pringle-Pattison has nobly said in his Giffert 
Lectures: 


‘Each time that an earthly body of a belief is 
laid in the dust, it receives a more glorious spirit- 
ual body, in which it continues to function as of 
old in the heart of man. ‘Timid theologians who 
tremble for the ark of God at every advance of 
scientific knowledge do but repeat the sacrilege of 
Uzzah in the sacred legend, smitten by the anger 


Ly! 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


of heaven for his officious interference. Faith, 
which is an active belief in the reality of the ideal, 
is the very breath by which humanity lives, and it 
will reconstitute itself afresh as long as the race 
endures.”’ 


In order to restate our thought of God, we need 
to begin at the centre of our own most vital knowl- 
edge and to work outward from that. ‘The one 
thing which every man knows with immediacy of 
understanding is his own self. He is aware of 
himself as a living focus of sensation, thought, de- 
sire, and action. He is a mind that meditates, a 
consciousness which feels and discriminates be- 
tween this and that, a will that launches its ener- 
gies into his environment. In short, the man him- 
self is not his body, nor the material world in which 
his body moves, but that living and energizing 
self-consciousness, the invisible but most real per- 
sonality which he knows when he shuts his eyes and 
looks within. Here within ourselves, in the aware- 
ness of one separate spirit, every one of us has his 
most certain consciousness of reality. Now we 
turn to the words of Jesus, and we read that He 
said, ‘‘God is a spirit.” If then we want to real- 
ize the meaning of God, we may well begin by 
considering what a spirit is and what it does. In- 
stead of looking first for the reflection of God in 
the material creation, in solar systems and 
geologic processes which bewilder the imagina- 


§2 


Tea EY ORE Ak WC Ys Obes GOD 


tion, in the making of worlds and rocks and trees 
and all the designs of things too intricate for us to 
unravel, we had better postpone all these which 
we can never know except at second-hand, and look 
at our own selves, which we know at first-hand, and 
see what idea of God we can find reflected there. 

When we try that, we come close to some very 
simple facts, and simple facts are exactly what we 
need. It may turn out that, in order to find God 
and understand Him, we do not have to enter upon 
some elaborate process of argument, but only to 
take at their clear value the very clearest of our 
everyday experiences. That clearest and most cer- 
tain experience is the fact that the invisible spirit 
which we call ourself is constantly projecting its 
expression and making its influence felt out in the 
world of the visible things. A great orator stands 
up and pleads a cause. People may say that they 
look at him and see him standing there before their 
eyes; but, as a matter of fact, of course they do not 
see him at all. They only see a more or less ani- 
mated face. They hear some sounds which are 
made by tongue and teeth in rapid motion. And 
yet by these means the miracle is being wrought 
that the man there before them, the invisible per- 
son who is looking through that face and speaking 
through that voice, does use those instruments to 
convey his thoughts into the minds of those other 
invisible persons who sit in the listening throng. 


a 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


Meanwhile where is the man who is pouring out 
the passion of his plea? He is there in his body, 
of course, you say. Butishe? He uses his body; 
but he certainly is not in it in any limited spatial 
sense. He is in control of a body which is the fo- 
cus of his self-expression; but he is not only there, 
if the multitude is listening to him; he in a real 
sense is as truly yonder among the crowd as he is 
at the place where his body stands. Thus while 
he remains himself, the man is entering into other 
selves, and not merely into different persons in suc- 
cession, but into many persons at the same time. 
Wherever he makes himself understood and felt, 
there the actual spiritual fact of him is. 

To make still more clear what I mean, let me 
put it this way. I know of two men who live in 
different cities, and one day one of them fell to 
thinking of his absent friend. He sat down and 
wrote him a letter, simply to tell him that he was 
thinking of him and missing the sight of him. A 
few days later there came a reply from the one to 
whom the letter went, and this is what he wrote. 
He said, ‘Your letter came at exactly the right 
time. It so happened that I was feeling very blue 
and discouraged that morning because I was facing 
a business interview which I shrank from very 
much. The men whom I was to meet had been 
prejudiced against me by representations made to 
them beforehand to my disadvantage, and I had 


54 


Te beOR bh Ao leh Y" .Ob.G.OD 


very little hope of being able to get my own pro- 
posal fairly considered. Then your letter came, 
‘just when a feller needed a friend,’ and bucked me 
up so that I went to the meeting with a new con- 
fidence, presented my case with conviction and car- 
ried the point I was fighting for.” 

Where that day was the man who wrote the first 
letter of affection to his absent friend? In com- 
mon speech it would be said that he was where his 
body was—that is to say, that he was hundreds of 
miles distant from the city where that friend of his 
was facing his particular difficulty; and yet it 1s 
perfectly clear, as a matter of living fact, that he 
was not only where visibly he seemed to be, but 
also where his friend, with the apprehension of his 
spirit, found him to be. The thought of the one 
had gone out to the other. His affection and sym- 
pathy were with his friend, and to that friend’s 
apprehension it was exactly as though he were 
there. In the immediate relationship to his 
friend’s consciousness, that is exactly where he 
was. 

When men were at the front in France, they 
were often desperately lonely. Sometimes in their 
loneliness, when they got out of the lines, they 
would go and do unclean things because all the 
decent safeguards of home were far away. But 
there were men who carried with them a picture of 
their mother, or a Bible perhaps which they had 


a8) 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


had from her. Another man might have with him, 
there in the pocket of his uniform, a letter from 
the girl he loved at home. When they remem- 
bered these, they were aware of something that 
bridged the far distance between themselves and 
home. The spirit of the one they loved was stand- 
ing at their side with a sweetness of high expecta- 
tion, and confidence, and strength; and those men 
were stayed, and kept clean and courageous, be- 
cause of the presence that walked, unseen to others, 
at their side. 

Such facts as these help at least to point the way 
toward our right thought of God. The more we 
think of our own spirits and of the human spirits 
which come into touch with ours, the more we com- 
prehend the living Reality, invisible and imma- 
terial, which can express itself irrespective of space 
or time. 

The beauty of this conception of God is that it 
is not something to be settled by abstract argu- 
ment, but that it can be put to the test. It need 
not be inferred from books. It can be demon- 
strated through obedience. As there are certain 
laws of the physical world by which, when a man 
conforms to them, he possesses power which is 
ready to flow through them to him, so there are 
spiritual laws concerning the communication of 
God through which a man may test the truth of 
that which he would fain believe in. Both in the 

56 


Ri akeA TTY, (One Gow 


physical world and in the spiritual, the miracles of 
the realized experience wait for him who will not 
stop before the empty curtain of appearance. We 
sit, for example, in a room where all is silent. 
There are no voices in the air, we think, and yet 
there are. Let a man set up the antenne of his 
radio. Let him turn its adjustment by so much as 
a hair, and suddenly out of the void come the 
voices. Here is the music of someone singing yon- 
der in a distant place. Here are the accents of a 
man speaking on some great national concern. 
These things are going on in the world whether we 
are conscious or unconscious; but when we adjust 
ourselves to them, they become part of the world 
in which we live and move and have our being. 
Thus is it also with our spiritual contacts with God. 
As material science makes plain to us that the uni- 
verse is full of possibilities hitherto undreamed of, 
to which we can link our familiar experience, so 
religion teaches us that the spiritual atmosphere 
also is filled at every instant with those energies 
that speak directly to the soul of man. God is not 
far from any one of us. He is near and close, 
personally to be known, lived in, and thereby 
proved. 

But someone may say of this idea that God 
exists and can make Himself felt by us in the same 
way in which one human personality makes itself 
upon another, that all the corroborative evidences 


57 


SOME) OPEN WANS, “CO mGaoe® 


which make us able to believe in the human per- 
sonality are lacking in the case of God. We hear 
another person speak, and so infer directly the liv- 
ing consciousness which is speaking. We see the 
expression on the visible face. We look at the 
light in visible eyes; but we cannot see any embodi- 
ment of God nor hear any accents of His voice, 
and there are apparently endless logical difficulties 
to believing thus in God. How do we know that 
our thought of Him is anything more than the im- 
age of our own desire projected into the empty 
infinite,.as the tiny picture within the stereopticon 
is projected outside itself upon a screen? That is 
what much of the modern psychology is saying: 
religion is simply an interior complex; God is a 
figment of our own brains. 

To that question this is the answer. Let us re- 
member what happens when men lay hold of the 
bold hypothesis—if in the beginning it be no more 
than that—that God is the living Spirit with whom 
their own spirits can come into touch in the same 
essential way in which one human spirit enters into 
the life of another. It is true that we identify 
every human personality whom we know with a 
particular human body—with a face and eyes and 
a look we love—in which that person seems to 
dwell; but the more we reflect upon the inner real- 
ity of spirit, and the more we experience the power 
of another spirit to find us, to follow us, and to 


58 


PH be eR EAL Ty: OR? GOD 


touch our inner understanding, the more we begin 
at least to find it thinkable that the infinite Spirit 
of God can be independent of any physical focus, 
and that, though He does not dwell in any body 
which our physical eyes can look upon, neverthe- 
less from that centre of thought and love and will 
which is Himself, the immediate reality of His 
Spirit can go out everywhere to all His children 
who will let themselves become aware of Him. 
And when a life is joined in belief to God, then 
the experience of religion proclaims that there 1s 
such a blossoming as testifies to the reality of the 
cause which has produced it. Fruit does not grow 
unless it is joined to the living tree; and if through 
the influence of religion, the spirits of men do be- 
come fruitful with new courage, confidence, and 
hopeful power, then it may fairly be concluded 
that they are joined to the tree of life the roots of 
which are final truth. 

This puts the proof of religion in the realm of 
practical testing where it ought to be. It does not 
solve all philosophical difficulties. It does not 
work out a finished chart as to how God has been 
related to all history in the evolutionary process. 
We can wait for further light on that if once we 
have achieved a standing ground in our own ex- 
perience. If a man feels within himself, and his 
neighbors perceive in him, a new fulness of life 
‘which he possesses in exact proportion as he be- 


a 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


lieves in and lays hold upon a reality outside him- 
self, then that man presents the one witness for 
God which is ultimately convincing. Nothing less 
can satisfy any one of us. If once we are satisfied 
to that extent, then we know with an indubitable 
inner conviction that we have laid hold upon the 
divine fact which somehow and sometime will in- 
terpret the rest of the universe which now we do 
not understand. 

2. The second difficulty in the way of belief in 
God today we saw to be the self-sufficiency of our 
modern civilization. That dificulty, however, is 
by no means as stubborn now as it was a little time 
ago. Men’s confidence in their ability by a shrewd 
materialism to produce all that they want has been 
considerably chilled since 1914. The stones of our 
piled-up materialism cannot by themselves make a 
structure in which the life of men can securely 
dwell. Unless these things are cemented together 
by the mortar of a moral consciousness, the whole 
building comes tumbling about our ears. That is 
exactly what has been happening in the last decade, 
and men look up out of the debris and confusion 
where their towers of Babel have fallen down and 
begin to ask themselves whether the trouble was 
that they builded without thought of God. Is He 
needed, after all, to hold together even that fabric 
of our so-called practical affairs which once we 

60 


Dl RE ALT Yo? OR? GOD 


thought could be the sufficiency that should prove 
we had no need of Him? 

What is the reason why the world is so slow to 
recover from the shock of the war? What is the 
cause for the continued prostration of so much of 
Europe? It is not lack of physical resources. 
There are the same fields with the same fertility as 
before. The sun shines, and the rain falls, and the 
grain would grow. In spite of brutal destruction 
here and there, trees bud in the forest, and coal 
and iron ore in abundance can be taken out of the 
ground. The technical skill which men had before 
the war has not been lost; but the human factor in 
industry has been disrupted. The problem of Eu- 
rope and the problem of the world is not material 
but spiritual. We are face to face with the stag- 
gering fact that, in a world full of potential pros- 
perity, factories can stand idle and crowds of hun- 
gry and hopeless men wander unemployed. Whole 
populations can feel the pinch of bitter privation, 
and nations can stagger toward the precipice of 
anarchy and economic dissolution, all because the 
human spirit is torn by suspicion, jealousy and 
hate. Human passions have got into a vicious 
circle where they go round and round in their own 
blind madness. The wisest men begin to think 
that there is no power to break it, unless a power 
greater than any of our contemptible little selfish 
calculations reaches down to touch the hearts of 


61 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


men with a religious passion which will deliver 
them from themselves. 

Furthermore, the war brought to a focus and 
exhibited in unmistakable fashion the result of 
tendencies which had been operating everywhere 
in supposedly peaceful pursuits, and it has made 
plain that in our conduct of everyday affairs we 
may be heading straight for disaster unless we can 
put into the hearts of men those very religious 
convictions which we had thought that we could 
get along without. Industry and business had come 
to be in large measure war. The interest of the 
individual was pitted against some other individ- 
ual, the interest of one industrial class against an- 
other class, everyone following the supposed wis- 
dom of selfishness: that the prize is to the strong, 
the race is to the swift, and may the devil take the 
hindmost. ‘The result is that there is a pleasant 
prospect that the devil may take us all. Capital- 
ists who have manipulated their privileges to ex- 
tort money from the public and to grind the last 
ounce of effort out of the men whose labor they 
control, and workmen whose one idea of their part 
in the community, now that their day of power has 
come, seems to consist in extorting as high wages 
as possible by any method of strikes and intimida- 
tion, while making the work they do more slovenly 
and shoddy all the time—these between them have 
cursed our world with so much stupid wasteful- 


62 


Tei ke AGL) bin y \ OP 4G Ob 


ness and deliberate inferiority that it is hard for 
any one to consider what we have produced with- 
out a bad taste in his mouth. 

Against such facts the hopeful and inspiring 
thing is that men of vision are realizing the difh- 
culty and setting themselves to correct it. Here 
and there in the midst of industry are rising the 
leaders who see that a new spirit must be brought 
into our common work if its results are to be suc- 
cessful; that there must be a codperation of a finer 
mutual confidence; that, in order that the wheels 
of industry may turn without friction and collision, 
there must be a new human spirit in the wheels. 

A recent number of the “Survey Graphic’ car- 
ried an article entitled, ‘““B. & O. Engine Number 
1003.” It describes what has been happening in 
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shops at Glen- 
wood. After the long and costly strike of the 
railroad shopmen in 1922, this particular railroad 
determined that a new start had to be made in the 
relationship between the directors of the industry 
and the men who did the work. Consequently a 
policy was worked out of coéperation in produc- 
tion and stabilization in employment, in which the 
men, through their union representatives, were in- 
vited to join with the managers in organizing the 
conduct of the shop. Formerly the men’s organi- 
zation represented one interest, the managers an- 
other. Now the deliberate effort was made to 

63 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


recognize and to express a community of interest. 
The men were asked in their own union lodge 
rooms, which formerly had served the negative 
function of a military base for the laborer fighting 
against the interest of the employer, to take as 
part of their own province a discussion of produc- 
tion, workmanship, job analysis, tool requirements, 
and material supply. And the opinion of the men, 
shaped by discussion from their own knowledge 
and experience, was then carried up to conference 
with the managers for the ordering of the shop on 
the basis of common agreement. The result of all 
this was Engine Number 1003. When it went out 
upon the tracks, it was the symbol, not only of a 
new industrial order of things, but of a new human 
fellowship. It was the outward and visible sign 
of a reconstruction of the attitudes of management 
and men toward one another. In other words, it 
was the sign of that which the wisest leaders, both 
in the ranks of capital and labor, are beginning to 
find out, namely, that there can be no industrial 
efficiency without a right human spirit—and when 
we speak of a right human spirit, we are going 
down to those deep realities of character the ad- 
justment of which is fundamentally religious. 

In April, 1924, there died in Atlanta Mr. John 
J. Eagan, President of the American Cast Iron 
Pipe Company. He left an extraordinary will, 
according to which he assigned all the common 


64 


TH Ba aoa Bit Yr Fis G OzD 


stock of his company to trustees who should con- 
trol the company for the sole purpose of enabling 
it “to deliver the company’s product to persons 
requiring it, at actual cost, which shall be consid- 
ered the lowest possible price consistent with the 
maintenance and extension of the company’s plant 
or plants and business and the payment of reason- 
able salaries and wages to all the employes of said 
company, my object being to insure ‘service’ both 
to the purchasing public and to labor on the basis 
of the Golden Rule given by our Lord and Savior 
Jesus Christ.” 

The experiment at Glenwood and the will of 
Mr. Eagan might be put aside as isolated and pe- 
culiar; but though they are extraordinary, they 
are neither isolated nor peculiar. They are ex- 
pressions of a spirit which is spreading rapidly 
through American business and industry. They 
are illustrations of the fact that men are feeling 
the urge of so adjusting their practical affairs that 
the deep human instincts of codperation, kindli- 
ness, and mutual service shall not be thwarted and 
repressed, but instead shall find their full expres- 
sion in the practical interests of every day. 

Is it not plain that here the roads are open for 
a nobler consciousness of the presence of God? 
Here are the mighty energies of the nation in shop 
and factory and mine. It is possible for these 
things to represent policies so relentless and cruel 


65 


8 OME) OPEN OWaACY S30 OliG aap 


—and in the long run so stupid—that they repress 
and pervert all the finer human instincts. Con- 
ceived merely in terms of competitive selfishness, 
the intended pursuit of profit can mean the de- 
struction of men’s souls. It can make a mockery 
of religion by reducing daily life to a sordid selfish- 
ness barren of any ideal; but through the ugliness 
of those old conceptions, the nobler possibility 
breaks like sunlight. As Ramsay MacDonald, the 
Prime Minister of Great Britain, has written: 
“The convictions of the heart are never stilled. 
They not only are unsleeping in supplying stand- 
ards of excellence alien to those in common use 
by which the work of Society is appraised, but 
also in their demands that social structure shall be 
determined by the higher requirements and by 
nothing else. . .. The pluto which heaves be- 
neath Society and which sends tremors through its 
apparently solid mass is the spirit to which we do 
homage as Christianity. There lies the conflict. 
The end may be far off. It may be separated from 
these times by turmoil, revolution, madness. But 
the spirit will not die down, because it is one of 
the powers of creation.’ And in order that those 
mighty forces of the human spirit which inevitably 
will remake our social order may work their crea- 
tive changes not through “turmoil, revolution, 
madness,” the deliberate conscience of our time 
must acrept its social responsibility with a relig- 


66 


WHE eR Pe Aeb Y) < O.ky GOD 


ious imagination. All the energies of men, as 
well as the products of the earth, can be used as 
the gifts of God. Industry can be made a holy 
thing, deliberately conceived so as to develop a 
better quality of life in those who work for it and 
to produce the materials for more spacious living 
for the people at large. To catch the gleam of 
that desire is to bring the glory of God down into 
drafting-room and shop and union lodge and office 
of management. It is to treat the daily work with 
religious understanding and to make men fellow- 
workers with God, for the expression through 
their commonest work of high purposes in which 
their spirits can expand. It is to make religion a 
living fact because the real success of what men 
do is found to be dependent upon obedience to 
those very principles of human brotherhood which 
conscience always had vaguely apprehended and 
now can boldly recognize to be the voice of God. 

3. Finally there is the difficulty in the way of be- 
lief in God caused by the suffering and moral evil 
of our world. How can we believe in God, men 
ask, in the face of contradictions to the only kind 
of a God, loving, compassionate, and dependable, 
who would be worth believing in? 

Confronted by that challenge, we go back and 
face the totality of facts. It is perfectly true that 
there is in our world the tragedy of much evil, 
with all its moral contradiction. Yet evil is not 


67 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


the only thing we find. Side by side with it, we 
mark the extraordinary uprising of the human 
spirit perfected into nobler expression by the very 
evil itself, to meet the moral need, and overcome 
it. This fact we cannot leave out of the reckon- 
ing. There are two elements in the reality, evil 
and the goodness which grapples with it. To 
which of these shall we give our verdict as the 
one most likely to hold the clue to truth? 

The characteristic of religion is that it dares to 
cast its hazard on the nobler side. Religious faith 
espouses its conviction of God, in spite of all those 
appearances which for the moment are contradic- 
tory, and deliberately selects out of its knowledge 
the nobler elements and throws the substance of 
its life into the scale to prove these good. 

In such a faith as that the great souls in all the 
centuries have dared to live. We turn back and 
read the old story of Joseph sold into Egypt by 
his brethren, condemned to undeserved disasters, 
yet through the stark evil that everywhere seemed 
to be arrayed against him, battling his courageous 
way toward that triumph of his own integrity 
which was all the brighter because of the odds 
through which he fought. The greatness of his 
living lay in the fact that he never whimpered 
beneath misfortune nor lost his confidence in the 
ultimate guidance of God, even when defeat and 
disillusionment shut in most darkly round him. 


68 


THE REALITY OF) GOD 


In that final day when his brethren who had sold 
him as a slave into Egypt stood before him lifted 
now to power next to Pharaoh, Joseph, remember- 
ing all the evil they had done him, could look be- 
neath that to the mysterious and blessed power 
which had overruled it by His own better way. 
“So now it was not you that sent me hither. It was 
God,” he said—God, who had turned the very 
instruments of evil into honor and praise. 

So Paul, through the sufferings he endured for 
the Cross of Christ, could hear the inward voice 
that spoke to him: ‘‘My grace is sufficient for 
thee, for my strength is made perfect in weak- 
ness,” and he answered, ‘“‘Most gladly, therefore 
will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power 
of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take 
pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessi- 
ties, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: 
for when I am weak, then am I strong.” 

And through Gethsemane Jesus Himself went 
on, past Calvary, to the vindication of Easter 
morning. There in His agony in the garden, all 
the dark shadow of human sin closed down. It is 
possible, of course, for men to think that the 
Gethsemanes of life have the last word to say, and 
that the roads of reality end on the hill where the 
cross of unmerited suffering may be the final por- 
tion not only of the evil, but also of the good. 
But religion dares to hold that tragedy and dark- 

69 


SOME OPENS W AY So OlG Op 


ness never are the end, and that past these things 
there is the leading of the hand of God which 
brings men out to the vindication of a mightier 


life. 
III 


Thus the way is open for belief in God. The 
difficulties which are incident to our time can dis- 
solve like a fog through which one passes to the 
sunlight on the other side. Yet it is not enough 
to recognize that the way is open. We must go 
ahead to walk upon that way. It is not enough to 
believe in God. In actual fact we must find Him. 
How, then, shall we do that? 

1. First of all, we enable ourselves to appropri- 
ate the reality by letting our thoughts dwell on the 
wonder of its living fact. There comes a point 
where we need to lay aside all those abstract con- 
ceptions of religion which busy themselves with 
speculations of this and that. We must lift our 
souls to consider the glowing truth of a God who 
ultimately needs not to be argued about, needs 
not to be proved by theories, a God who is, and 
who in His own impulse reaches out to us. We 
can be quiet in our own searchings and let our 
spirits expand with the thrilling consciousness that 
we ourselves are sought by Him. ‘‘We love Him,” 
wrote St. John, ‘because He first loved us.” “I 


70 


hte REALITY OF) GOD 


press on,” said St. Paul, “if so be that I may ap- 
prehend that for which I am already appre- 
hended.” No less objectively sure than the hands 
which we reach up to God are the hands of the 
steady love with which He reaches down to us. 

“Do you wake?” asked St. Bernard. “Well, 
He too is awake. If you arise in the night-time, 
if you anticipate to your utmost your earliest 
awaking, you will already find Him awaking. You 
will never anticipate His own awakings. In such 
an intercourse, you will always be rash if you at- 
tribute any priority, any predominant share to 
yourself; for He loves both more than you love 
and before you love at all.” 

Once we have steeped our spirits in this con- 
sciousness, then the whole aspect of our world be- 
comes a different thing. No longer are we wan- 
dering wistfully in what may prove a void, depend- 
ing upon our desperate desire to find something 
which may not be there. We are moving instead 
through a creation filled with the spirit of Him 
who has made it, and who, through a thousand 
points of contact, presses home to the souls of men 
whom He has created for Himself. 

2. God can come close to us through the beauty 
of external things. No one can contemplate the 
life of Jesus without perceiving how real was this 
religious ministry which earth and field and sky 
wrought for Him. Up into the hills He went 


Ae 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


when He would commune with God, or under the 
brooding stillness of overhanging trees, or out in 
the wide darkness, lighted only by the quiet stars. 
The glint of a bird’s wing, the color of the flowers 
in the field, the wide shimmer of the blue waters 
of the lake, were eloquent of a beauty deeper than 
all transient form—the inexhaustible beauty of the 
grace of God, whose purposes are beautiful for all 
his children’s life. Even as Jesus did, so do we 
also need to do. We need to look at the loveli- 
ness of the universe around us, not merely as those 
who look at sights of aesthetic pleasantness, but 
with the expectation of those who remember that 
through the things they see may come the conscious- 
ness of the living God, with whom the commonest 
bush may be aflame. To stand, even if it be but 
for a moment, by the open window at the waking 
of the day and look into the wideness of the sky; 
to catch a glimpse, through the noonday turmoil, 
of a tree or flower, or the glint of water at the end 
of a crowded street; to lift the eye at evening to 
the quiet of the stars—even these little things may 
be enough to keep open the channels through which 
the reality of God shall flow. Only the other day 
I heard of a girl who bent over her typewriter, 
high up in one of the great office buildings of lower 
New York, weary and dejected, when another girl 
came by and saw her. By a quick instinct she per- 
ceived that something was wrong, and called her 


72 


RE REAL DY OF: GOD 


to the window. There below them, beyond the 
rush of the city, lay the flowing river, reaching out 
toward the far horizon and the distant suggestion 
of the sea. ‘Whenever I get tired,” the second 
one said, ‘I come and stand and look at that, and 
it makes me remember that God is big enough to 
take care of me.” 

3. Again, God can come home to us as a living 
reality through the routine of daily duty. There 
is no need of that division by which so much of 
life is often set apart as secular and treated as 
an uninspired thing, to be lighted only with fugi- 
tive glimpses from special moments of religious 
experience, attained only in a particular place and 
on a particular day. Through God, in whom all 
life may live and move and have its being, all the 
commonest responsibilities may become gateways 
of the divine. If God has put His children at the 
posts of ordinary faithfulness, the communication 
there and then of the grace which comes from God, 
the lifting up of our daily occupations from shal- 
lowness of interest into the more brimming fulness 
of an inspiring meaning, depends simply upon our 
recognition of the divine possibility which is al- 
ready there. The smallest duty has within itself 
the capacity to hold the greatness of God. What 
is needed simply is that our spiritual awareness 
should open the channel gates through which the 
tidal consciousness of God shall enter. 


rs: 


SOME | OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


In his life of the great reformer, Dr. McGif- 
fert has quoted these fine words of Martin 
Luther: 


“What you do in your house is worth as much as 
if you did it up in Heaven for our Lord God. For 
what we do in our calling here on earth in accord- 
ance with His word and command He counts as 
if it were done in heaven for Him.... In 
whatever calling God has placed you do not aban- 
don it when you become a Christian. If you are 
a servant, a maid, a workman, a master, a house- 
wife, a mayor, a prince, do whatever your position 
demands. For it does not interfere with your 
Christian faith and you can serve God rightly in 
any vocation. ... Therefore we should accus- 
tom ourselves to think of our position and work 
as sacred and well-pleasing to God, not on its own 
account, but because of the word and faith from 
which our obedience flows. No Christian should 
despise his position if he is living in accordance 
with the word of God, but should say, ‘I believe 
in Jesus Christ, and do as the ten commandments 
teach, and pray that our dear Lord God may help 
me thus to do”... It looks like a great thing 
when a monk renounces everything, goes into a 
cloister, lives a life of asceticism, fasts, watches, 
prays and the like. On the other hand it looks 
like a small thing when a maid cooks, and cleans, 
and does other housework. But because God's 
command is there, even such a lowly employment 
must be praised as a service of God, far surpass- 
ing the holiness and asceticism of all monks and 
nuns. 


74 


WHE REALTY: OF) ‘GOD 
To those words of Luther might well be added 


these which were written by a Chinese woman to 
whom the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ 
had come: 


“When opening the door, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
ppen the door of my heart that I may receive Thee, 
Lord, within. 

“When washing clothes, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
wash my heart and make it pure and white as 
snow. 

“When sweeping the floor, I pray Thee, Lord, 
sweep my heart from all evil and make it clean. 

“When buying oil, I pray Thee, Lord, to give 
me wisdom like the wise virgins who had the oil 
ready in their vessels. 

“When receiving or sending letters, I pray Thee, 
Lord, to give me more faith that I may hold con- 
stant communication with ‘Thee. 

“When drawing water, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
give me the Living Water that I may never thirst. 

“When lighting the lamp, I pray Thee, Lord, let 
Thy true light shine within my heart, and make 
me in all that I do to be kind and good like a 
lamp which lightens others. 

“When watering plants, I pray Thee, Lord, to 
send down spiritual showers upon my heart so that 
it may bring forth good fruit. 

“When boiling water to infuse tea, I pray Thee, 
Lord, to give spiritual fire to warm my cold heart, 
and give me a heart on fire to serve bees 


4. Finally, and best of all, the consciousness of 
God may come to us through our friendships, and 


75 


5 OoMCE VOLPE NAVAS Goa 


our loves. It is impossible to see some other life 
which manifestly is filled with holiness and beauty 
without feeling God’s Spirit there. It is the busi- 
ness of religion to make continually more explicit 
this recognition of God as He comes through hu- 
man souls. A reading of the lives of great Chris- 
tian saints and heroes will open new windows into 
the apprehension of God. A constant study of the 
life of Christ, of course, is best of all. But not 
only through the figures of the historic past, but 
also through our comrades of the present, this 
reality of God may be presented. To see in the 
faithfulness of some friend, in the invincible de- 
votion of the mother, in the loyalty through good 
or ill of a woman to the man she has married, 
that which surpasses a mere individual excellence 
and represents instead some of the meaning of 
the eternal holiness and love, is to come into con- 
tact with the presence of God. 

So also this finding of God through personal 
relationships is not only a matter of what we per- 
ceive, but also of what we create. The best way 
for any life to possess the glory of God is to con- 
vey God to another. If, for example, the mother 
thinks greatly of her child and her child’s possi- 
bilities, if she desires for that child not mere in- 
dulgence in trivialities and shallow make-believes, : 
but rather the deep worth of character and of true 
accomplishment, then she will know that she must 


76 


RHE RE ALT TY (OB GOD 


lay hold of a life that is abler than her own, and 
the instinctive outpouring of her own desire 
toward her child will make her draw from the 
fulness of God to fulfil that which is lacking in 
herself. If a man wants to serve his friend, or 
if in company with others of like spirit with him- 
self, he wants to serve some public cause of truth 
and righteousness, he too, the more he gives him- 
self to the utmost to that which unselfishly he 
wants to accomplish, will call to himself the real- 
ized comradeship of God. The better and nobler 
any soul tries to make the contribution of its life 
to others, the more it becomes aware of its need 
of God, and the more vividly it becomes assured 
of Him as-He comes to supply that need. There 
are many whose fine sense of responsibility makes 
them say, as they look upon the sorrows and hun- 
gers and unfulfilled possibilities of the lives that 
touch their own, in the words of the parable of 
Jesus, “A friend of mine has come to me in his 
journey, and I have nothing to set before him,” 
and because they want to set before him that real 
food of the Spirit which they do not sufficiently 
possess, they go and knock at the doors of God, 
and pass those doors to which an unselfish need 
has sent them, they find themselves face to face 
with Him. “I will therefore,” said Luther, 
“sive myself as a sort of Christ to my neigh- 
bor, as Christ has given himself to me, and will do 


77 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


nothing in this life except what I see to be need- 
ful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neigh- 
bor, since through faith I abound in all good things 
in Christ . . .... Man does not live for himself 
alone in this mortal body, in order to work on 
its account, but also for all men on earth; nay, 
he lives only for others and not for himself. For 
to this end he brings his own body into subjection 
that he may be able to serve more sincerely and 
freely .... Itis the part of a Christian to take 
care of his body for the very purpose that by 
its soundness and well-being he may be able to 
labor and to acquire and save property for the aid 
of those who are in want, that thus the strong 
member may serve the weak, and we may be sons 
of God, thoughtful and busy one for the other, 
bearing one another’s burdens and so fulfilling 
the law of Christ. Behold, here is the truly Chris- 
tian life, here is faith really working by love, when 
it applies itself with joy and love to the work of 
freest servitude, in which it serves others freely 
and spontaneously, itself abundantly satisfied with 
the fulness and riches of its own faith.” 

Thus through the fulness of experience men may 
lay hold of the fact of God. As the only way to 
understand life is by living, so the only way to 
know the present power of the divine life is to 
live in sympathy with the divine. When men 
order their choices, their assumptions of what is 


78 


TARE mR AL Tn) Oe By Gi Oni 


real, and their experiment of action in the light 
of a trust in the living God; when with deliberate 
eyes they shape their adventure on the roads of 
faith;—at the end of it they shall find the fulfil- 
ment of the promise, /f with all your hearts ye 
truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me, saith 


the Lord. 


79 


CHAPTER III 
JESUS CHRIST 


THE most remarkable element in the question 
of belief in Jesus Christ is the fact that it should 
interest us at all. 

On the day when He died, nothing seemed more 
evident than that the world would take account 
of Him no more. He had lived for a little time, 
not more than thirty-three years at most, in an 
unimportant province of the Roman Empire. His 
preaching and His ministry, though welcomed by 
the common people, had been met by a growing 
hostility among the leaders of His people both 
in Church and State. At length they pitted their 
authority against His in one decisive trial of 
strength, and to all appearances they had won. 
The crowd had turned away from Him, some of 
them cowed, some of them angered and resentful 
that the deliverance and prosperity which they 
thought He would bring them had not come to 
pass. The Chief Priests arrested Him in the 
Garden of Gethsemane. With the mob stream- 
ing behind, they carried Him before the Roman 
Governor, Pilate, whom they so intimidated that 
he delivered Jesus up to be crucified. Between 
two thieves on Calvary, they put Him to death. 

80 


JESUS CHRIST 


They mocked Him as He hung there dying, and 
when the day was over and they turned back to 
the city, that broken body on the cross against 
the sky seemed the manifest witness that Jesus 
was defeated and that His enemies were tri- 
umphant. It looked as though they were right 
when they said He pretended to a power He did 
not have. He was out of their way now, once 
and for all. They and their successors need con- 
cern themselves no further with Him. 

Since that time some nineteen centuries have 
gone by. The Chief Priests have sunk into ob- 
livion. All their little power and pride is buried 
with the dust of long dead centuries; but the Man 
they thought they killed they did not kill. His 
Spirit is alive in the world today. Out to the 
far quarters of a world more vast than that which 
any man in Palestine ever dreamed, His Name 
has been carried. The cross which once was a 
symbol of defeat and shame has become a sacra- 
mental thing in the strength of which heroes have 
struggled and martyrs have died and saints in dra- 
matic and undramatic places have fashioned the 
stuff of nobler living day by day. That fact needs 
no explanatory theories to make it wonderful. It 
needs no cloud of argument gathering round it to 
make it loom magnified in size like an object seen 
in a mist. There it stands on the horizon of the 
world’s realities like some mighty mountain-peak 

81 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


towering sheer above all surrounding things, glis- 
tening between the earth and sky. Whatever else 
men may believe or doubt concerning Jesus, they 
cannot escape the fact that the men were wrong 
who thought that they had finished their reckon- 
ing with Him when they nailed Him to His cross. 
The power that was in Him conquered His con- 
querors. He is a fact that cannot be forgotten. 
Tie must be dealt with for yea or nay. 

There is something immeasurably awe-inspiring 
in this fact of the inescapableness of Jesus. The 
symbol of the mountain does not sufficiently ex- 
press Him. It is not alone that His continuing 
power is like a silent witness, an historic fact 
which we can abstractly consider from afar. 
Rather it is a living presence that follows on all 
the paths of men. Like the Hound of Heaven, 
the strange authority of His pursuing Spirit haunts 
the minds of men, and 


“Still with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
Come on the following Feet, 
And a Voice above their beat— 
‘Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.’ ” 


Recognizing, therefore, the unquestionable sig- 
nificance of Jesus Christ. for the intellectual and 
spiritual interests of men, what we want to do is 

82 


PE Os ACT KT Sul 


to consider as clearly and thoroughly as we can, 
how and why it was that He was attained, and 
whether in this twentieth century He still can hold, 
this extraordinary position to which the history of 
nineteen hundred years bears record. 


I 


As we go forward to this consideration, we re- 
member that there are two elements in the esti- 
mate which men have had of Jesus, and it is this 
double fact which has led to the deep and often 
passionate differences of interpretation concerning 
Him. For He has been accounted not simply a 
great exemplar of the strength and winsomeness 
of human personality, not simply one among the 
saints and heroes who witness to the noble striv- 
ings of the human soul; He has been lifted to that 
divine supremacy before which all other human 
souls bow down. It is not only that He has relig- 
ious and inspirational value, He has become Him- 
self a religion. When, therefore, we try to under- 
stand Him, it is this complex fact which we must 
try to understand. Our thought will deal, there- 
fore, with a subject which has great heights and 
depths of wonder, and widenesses of meaning 
where our ordinary analyses may stand halted 
upon the borderland of mystery into which only a 
very sensitive intuition can press through. 

Nevertheless, though it is true that men’s 


83 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


thought of Jesus is bound thus to lead ultimately 
to facts which tax the utmost richness of their ex- 
planation, yet it is not true that there is needed 
any standing ground of an elaborate learning from 
which to begin. Nothing has been more respon- 
sible for the confused and hopeless ideas which 
many people have of Christianity, than the heavy 
insistence of some theologians that all the ponder- 
ous ideas which thinkers have arrived at should be 
dinned into the ears of the inquirer when he first 
asks who and what Jesus may be. As a matter 
of fact, the real knowledge of Him always has 
begun and always will begin, from very vital sim- 
plicities. ‘That is the way it was for the first dis- 
ciples, and those today who would recapture their 
experience must begin where they began. 

I. First, then, let us consider how the attach- 
ment of the original disciples to Jesus did actually 
take place. 

It was a very simple thing at first—that attach- 
ment of themselves to Him. They did not start 
with any elaborate theories about Him. They 
did not join themselves to His company through 
any articulated theological reasons. It was a very 
human matter of personal attraction. They were 
going about their ordinary business with no notion 
of any extraordinary career about to open before 
them, and then this figure crossed their paths. 
His environment and His associations had not been 


84 


JESUS) (CHRIST 


different from that of other men; but He was 
different. There was a strength and a magnetism 
about Him which marked Him out from the crowd. 
There was a strange quality of leadership and an 
ability to win confidence and to awaken love. So 
when He invited men to come with Him, they fol- 
lowed Him as though it were the most natural 
thing in the world to do. Peter and Andrew and 
James and John left the fishing boats where they 
were, pulled up the nets by the side of the lake, 
abandoned the old work which they had followed 
all their life, to go with Him. Levi the tax-gath- 
erer gave up the position which doubtless he had 
gotten through much shrewd pains and costly ef- 
fort. Tax-gathering had been all very well until 
He saw Jesus, and then the old job lost its allure- 
ment. It was only a poor, sordid thing beside this 
new chance, and he turned his back upon it once for 
all. So also the others were gathered into the 
fellowship. They did not know what it was all 
going to lead to, but they were content simply to 
know that they would rather follow Jesus and 
try to live like Him than to do anything else in 
the world. 

2. It is plain, however, that to say that the dis- 
ciples followed Jesus simply because they felt this 
passing attraction of His human personality is not 
the whole of the story. That was not the way they 
ended. They saw Him at first as a man like other 


85 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


men, only greater, more masterful, and more win- 
some. They came finally to see that there was in 
Him something so vast that their everyday human 
explanations never could compass it all. 

Down various tracks of wandering, their minds 
began to go in search of an understanding of this 
personality of Jesus, which every day grew more 
impressive before their eyes. Those first disciples 
were Jews, so they followed first of all the gleam 
of that great ideal which had been kindled by the 
prophets of Israel like a beacon-fire upon the 
mountains, shining down the long pathways of a 
people’s hope. In every Jewish heart there was 
the slumbering dream of the coming of Messiah. 
He should be God’s Deliverer, bringing in the new 
day of release and blessing for His chosen people. 
Often the expectation of the Messiah had come 
to assume very concrete and materialistic form. 
He should be the Conqueror, and should build 
Himself a spiritual kingdom in which those who 
followed Him should rule with an authority from 
God. Flashes of this idea strike fire more than 
once through the pages of the Gospels, from the 
mind of the crowd and from the minds of the 
disciples themselves. In the Fourth Gospel it is 
recounted that once a multitude seemed about to 
come to take Jesus by force and make Him a king. 
The revolutionary instincts of Israel searching for 


86 


JESUS CHRIST 


a leader flooded round this figure with His extra- 
ordinary strength and command. The disciples 
also had caught some of the excitement of this 
hope. One day James and John came to Jesus, 
saying, ‘Master, we would that thou shouldst do 
for us whatsoever we shall desire.” And he said 
unto them, ‘“‘What would ye that I should do for 
you?” They said unto him, ‘‘Grant unto us that we 
may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on 
thy left hand, in thy glory.” They desired the 
thrones that should be next to His in the kingdom 
which they hoped might be set up. 

It was a hard lesson, but one which the disciples 
had to learn, that the idea of Messiah and His 
Kingdom which they shared with the crowd was 
not the idea of Jesus. He had not come to be a 
conqueror by any force of arms. He had come to 
bring a new order of human relationships to the 
earth, but not by any weapons of violence. He 
had come with the persuasion of the beauty of 
God’s holiness and the power of God’s love, to 
venture for an infinite gain which must be bought 
at desperate present loss. He would win a final 
spiritual victory for which the hearts of men could 
be made ready only through the witness of His own 
readiness to suffer and to die in its behalf. So— 
challenging the sins of men in high places and call- 
ing common men to a pitch of consecration from 


87 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


which they often rebelled in anger—Jesus moved 
straight forward to the inevitable collision of His 
life with the misunderstanding and hatred which 
were to crucify Him. He died, and with His 
death, it looked as though to His disciples there 
had come a double and complete disaster. The 
human personality which they had loved and fol- 
lowed had been killed. The hope of a great de- 
liverance of God through Him as Messiah had 
been brought to nothing. 

But through the strait gate of what seemed for 
the moment their utter loss, the disciples found 
themselves suddenly passing out into a spacious 
world of new understanding. Jesus had died, but 
He was not dead. No one can read the records 
of the early Church as they are preserved in the 
Gospels, in the Book of Acts, and in the Epistles, 
without perceiving the invincible certainty which 
the disciples possessed that they had again been 
in contact with the risen and living Spirit of Jesus. 
He had come back to them to bring them the cer- 
tainty of the triumph and love of God. Then 
in the light of that fact they began to see all their 
previous experience in a new perspective. The old 
crude thoughts of an earthly kingdom of Messiah 
did not matter any more. What counted was that 
Jesus had brought them God. In His presence 
they had felt the nearness of God. There was 

88 


JESUS CHRIST 


a new light on even the common things. There 
was a gladness in living because there was a sense 
of the greatness of life. God, who to many people 
is only a distant name, had been to them a glow- 
ing fact which they had experienced through Jesus. 
He was that “which we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word 
Ofiten: 

When men have found God, they know then 
that they have found the only thing which su- 
premely satisfies their hunger. All the selfish covet- 
ings and the mean ambitions are the husks with 
which men try to feed themselves when still un- 
wittingly they are starved for God. The disciples 
had thought they wanted thrones, wealth, and the 
other honors which the crowd clamored for. Now 
they found that, whatever else they had or failed 
to have, made little difference so long as they 
had the fulness of God in joy and peace and 
strength coming to them through Jesus. Life had 
found its source of power and its centre of rest. 
Through every changing appearance they could 
trust the reality which they had seen Jesus live by. 
The great Life, without which men’s little lives 
are empty, had come to them, and behold, the in- 
finite was revealed to be near and human and 
understanding because they had seen it and had 
touched it in Jesus. 


89 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


We shall never understand the meaning of 
Christian theology until we realize the deep roots 
of the personal experience out of which it grew. 
In Jesus, men for the first time seemed to possess 
that which wistfully through many centuries the 
heart of man had been desiring. In the dark lone- 
liness which seemed to shut him off from God, 
Job cried out, “For he is not a man, as I am, that 
I should answer him, and we should come together 
in judgment. Neither is there any daysman be- 
twixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.” 
Again and again, out of the human darkness, that 
cry has sounded—the cry for a God who might 
come near and interpret Himself to human need. 
That cry throbs with an instinct equally poignant 
and real whether it express itself in some childish 
word or in the thought of a religious seer. One 
night a little girl was left in her bed upstairs, as 
her mother kissed her good night and went down 
for the evening. To the child, reluctant to be left 
alone, the mother said, “‘But dearest, you are not 
alone. Your doll is here, and then you know that 
God is always with you.” “Yes,” said the child, 
“but even if I have my doll, and even if God is 
here, I want somebody with a skin face!” And 
with far lift of language from that of the little 
child, yet with the same simplicity of wistful de- 
sire, Browning makes David sing to Saul: 


90 


JESUS CHRIST 


“Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my 

flesh, that I seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul 
it shall be 

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man 
like to me, 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand 
like this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! 
See the Christ stand!” 


Men who long ago stood in the presence of Jesus 
and those who spiritually have stood in His pres- 
ence since then have felt this intimate precious- 
ness of God come close to them in Him. They 
know that there is nothing greater they could 
ask than that God in all the fulness of His reality 
should be just what Jesus was and is. So the 
movement of Christian faith has always been from 
the known Jesus out into what, save for Him, 
might be the unknown or the dimly known. It 
has been truly said that the doctrine of the divinity 
of Jesus is not so much a doctrine about Jesus 
as it is a doctrine about God. Here is His figure 
clear for us to understand, with His beauty of holl- 
ness, His white hatred of sin, and yet His infinite 
tenderness for the struggling sinner, His strength, 
and yet His gentleness, His might of moral au- 
thority and His stoop of infinite compassion. Is 


gl 


SOME’ OPEN? WAYS 270 “GiOgg 


God like that? This is what we want to know. 
And the leap of Christian faith proclaims tri- 
umphantly that He is. The destinies of the uni- 
verse, the ultimate control for ourselves, and for 
the forces which affect us, are in the hands of Him 
whom Jesus called His Father and whose nature 
we may understand through the One who knew 
Him best. It is because of that sure confidence 
which moves through its experience of Jesus as 
the Way and the Truth that one can write as Dr. 
Grenfell has written: “This is what life means to 
me—a place where a Father above deals ditter- 
ently with His different children but with all in 
love; a place where true joys do not hang on 
material pegs, and where all the while the fact 
that God our Father is on His throne lines every 
cloud with gold.” 

The theologies of Christendom are simply the 
effort to put into words some expression of that 
reality of God as found through Jesus which men 
have always felt more deeply and more surely 
than they can ever explain. It is a mistake to hold 
any theological formulas with too desperate an 
importance, for no one of them fully represents 
nor contains within itself the fulness of the experi- 
ence out of which it grew. Already in the New 
Testament we can see the blossomings of various 
theologies. The Gospel of John has one way of 
trying to explain the meaning of Jesus as the Word 


Q2 


PES Us CP RUSE 


of God. Paul has other ways of thought and other 
terms. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews 
has others yet. And all down through the Chris- 
tian centuries there have been many efforts both by 
individual seers and saints and by great councils, 
meeting together, to try to formulate their creeds 
to express the meaning of Jesus. The so-called 
Nicene Creed, for example, still regularly used in 
far the greater part of Christendom, represents 
the effort of the most acute thinkers and devoted 
teachers of the Church in the fourth century, to 
proclaim in sufficient form the permanent elements 
of Christian belief. They taught the Church to 
confess its faith “in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the 
only begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father 
before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, 
very God of very God, begotten not made, being 
of one substance with the Father, by whom all 
things were made.” There is no question but that 
these words, to many persons not habituated to 
them, have today an antique and unreal sound. 
They represent categories of thinking into which 
the conceptions of our time do not instinctively fit. 
They express religious values according to the con- 
cepts of the fourth century Greek philosophical 
tradition which to men living then was as native 
as the tongue they spoke, but which, to our later 
mind, has become somewhat awkward and con- 


Pde. 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


strained. In the Nicene Creed, therefore, and in 
all other efforts of individuals or Church councils 
to express in words the meaning of Jesus Christ, 
two elements must be distinguished. On the one 
hand, there is a form of expression necessarily 
local, necessarily transient, and never to be made 
by any mistaken hardening of Church tradition into 
a straitjacket for the mind of the Church in later 
times. On the other hand, there is the religious 
conviction itself which was striving for expression, 
and this living thing which created the form 1s that 
which enduringly needs to be understood and re- 
possessed. The expressions in creeds and theolo- 
gies are like flowers, full of the odors of a rich 
devotion, often very beautiful, but no one of them 
final nor exhaustive; and the changing centuries 
will inevitably bring forth new blossomings of in- 
terpretation from that which is always the source 
of Christian life, namely the deep rootage of the 
heart and conscience in the experienced reality of 
the nature of Jesus. 

Usually our best theologies are not in formal 
creeds, which may have about them the inevitable 
rigidity which comes from being hammered out 
in the midst of men’s intellectual conflicts. The 
best theologies are our prayers and hymns, for 
these preserve the quickened heart-beat, the rhap- 
sody, the lift of wings, the thrill of the inner song, 


Ey 


CES US CE REST 


which are the ever vital marks of the real religion. 
“My Jesus, my King, my Life, my Ali, I again 
dedicate my whole self to Thee,” wrote David 
Livingston on his last birthday; and Bernard of 
Clairvaux sang long ago the truth in which the 
Christian spirit perennially is glad: 


‘Jesus, Thou Joy of loving hearts! 
Thou Fount of life! Thou Light of men! 
From the best bliss that earth imparts 
We turn unfilled to Thee again. 


‘Thy truth unchanged hath ever stood; 
Thou savest those that on Thee call; 

To them that seek Thee, Thou art good, 
To them that find Thee, all in all.” 


II 


Thus far we have been speaking generally about 
the personality of Jesus Christ. The fact, how- 
ever, cannot be ignored that for innumerable 
people the thought of Jesus Christ Himself is so 
confused with certain perplexities which they find 
in their reading of the New Testament that they 
are uncertain whether or not they can truly say 
that they believe in Jesus Christ in any way which 
organized Christianity would acknowledge. They 
cannot somehow get His figure out of its back- 


2h 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


ground into a distinctness and approachableness 
which make their conviction able to lay hold on 
Him. According to the New Testament accounts 
and according to the interpretation of these which 
some very emphatic Christian teachers say is ne- 
cessary, the figure of Jesus seems to draw behind 
it a great train of representations so remote from 
our present experience that He Himself seems to 
be involved in a cloud that dims the outlines of 
His reality. Men say that in our time we are not 
accustomed to miracles, and do not expect them, 
but the New Testament account seems to be full 
of miracles. How, then, are we going to get the 
figure of Jesus vividly present in the world of our 
contemporary thought and experience, if we are to 
be dogmatically obliged to think of Him in terms 
of the New Testament miracle narratives, liter- 
ally interpreted and completely received? 

Here is a real difficulty, and we must meet it 
fairly and try to find a way through. What con- 
ception of the New Testament miracles can we 
arrive at which will retain for us a reverent sense 
of the essential value of the biblical tradition, 
and yet not force us to identify the ministry of 
Jesus with conditions fundamentally different from 
any with which we can possibly be familiar today? 

As we do thus try to consider the whole matter 
of the miracles and our possibility of knowledge 

96 


JESUS CHRIST 


concerning them, we realize that there is a double 
element in the material presented for our think- 
ing. In the first place, there was the fact of a 
supreme personality uniquely in touch with those 
resources which lie beyond the common boundary 
of our ordinary experience. The spirit of Jesus, 
in its contact with men and with matter too (that 
matter which our latest science reveals to be a thing 
so mysterious in its amazing energies), was alto- 
gether likely to produce reactions of an extraor- 
dinarily vital kind. That is one element of the 
record as it comes down to us; but the other ele- 
ment is this. The record was written in an age 
which had no conception of the exactitudes of 
science such as we know. It was written by men 
of Oriental mind, full of symbolism and poetry, 
indifferent to our literalisms, men who cared more 
for the color and spiritual impression of the fact 
than for its prosaic measurements. Neither their 
temperament nor their interest inclined them to 
make an absolute facsimile of the event they de- 
scribed, with every factor of evidence laboriously 
verified and unerringly set down. ‘They were poets 
of the wonder of their Lord, not prose investi- 
gators furnishing material for the laboratories 
of undreamt-of commentators. It is no more pos- 
sible to get out of some of the Gospel records of 
the miracles objective and first-hand knowledge of 


O% 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


the original fact than it is possible to count the 
blades of grass in the field of a landscape which 
some artist has painted. Unquestionably this 
makes a difficulty for our thought today. We can 
well believe that thrilling things occurred when 
Jesus stood in the presence of the needs of men, 
but exactly how to separate the occurrence, as 
modern scientific eyes might view it, from the lu- 
minous mist of the tradition through which it 
comes to us, we simply do not know. 

Yet there is no reason why we should be 
troubled about that. We do not have to know 
everything all at once. We can make the best 
of what we do know and leave the rest to be found 
out when the time may come. Some of the mira- 
cles, as we read them in the Gospels, are easier 
to appropriate with a full sense of reality than 
are some others. The most recent truth which 
men are learning in the realm of mental diseases 
gives new vividness to those incidents in which 
Jesus laid hold of some poor disassociated per- 
sonality, with its wild, evil instincts in possession, 
and, by the authority of His spirit, so brought it 
into wholeness that the ‘“‘casting out of devils” was 
not too strong a term for those who saw that heal- 
ing to employ. Neither is it difficult for the rey- 
erent spirit to conceive of the blind suddenly re- 
possessing sight, of men who had been deaf be- 


98 


JESUS CHRIST 


coming able to hear again, of the lame leaping 
up to walk, before that tremendous power which 
the surcharged life of Jesus could communicate. 

Other accounts of miracles puzzle us more,— 
such, for example, as the story of the coin in the 
fish’s mouth, the withering of the fig tree, the 
turning of the water to wine, the walking on the 
water, and the physical multiplying of the loaves 
and fishes. 

In the case of some of these, the difficulty is that 
they do not seem consonant with our conception of 
the spirit of Jesus. Did He actually pronounce a 
curse upon a fig tree because He found no fruit on 
it, so that the next day the disciples saw it to be 
withered from the root up? Did He actually send 
Peter to catch a fish in the lake and cause a coin to 
appear in the fish’s mouth for the astonished Peter 
to discover? It is true that we find these things 
written in our New Testament; but, drawn far 
more vividly there, is a picture of Jesus in His 
constant avoidance of mere wonder-working with 
which these accounts do not seem to agree. There- 
fore, does the story of a particular fig tree with- 
ered, represent a fact, or is it a later report which 
grew out of Jesus’ parable concerning an unfruit- 
ful tree? And may not the story of the coin in the 
fish’s mouth go back to some incident much simpler 
and more nearly related to the familiar ways of 


99 


SOME OPEN TW YS DO (Gow 


Jesus, which the crude imagination of the crowd 
laid hold of, and with the unconscious bias of the 
popular desire for magic and marvel, made into 
the story which had become part of the tradition 
when the evangelist wrote? ‘These are questions 
which earnest students of our gospels ask them- 
selves, not because they lack faith in the gospels 
but because they have such an overwhelming faith 
in that personality of Jesus which the gospels pre- 
sent that any detail which clashes with that is of 
necessity set aside for further scrutiny. 

In the case of some of the other miracles, the 
difficulty is a different one. For example, in the 
story of the walking on the water, in the phv;ical 
multiplying of the loaves and fishes, and even in 
the turning of the water into wine, there is noth- 
ing out of harmony with the spirit of Jesus, who, 
though He never used His powers for mere dis- 
play yet did always instantly bring the utmost that 
was in Him unselfishly to meet the needs of His 
friends. Rather the difficulty here is one of ad- 
justing the tradition concerning Jesus to the re- 
sults of our observation of the actual ways of 
God. Does God ordain, and did He ordain, that 
our physical universe should be as malleable to 
the touch of even the divinest human hands as 
some of these accounts of miracles, in the form in 
which we now have them, represent? Such a ques- 

100 


[BS USsC RH RUS 


tion embodies no unfaith, and certainly no denial. 
It may arise in minds quite free from any ante- 
cedent stubbornness of idea that things unprece- 
dented are impossible with God. In this wide unt- 
verse, so full of marvel and of mystery, and breath- 
ing everywhere the infinite creativeness of Him 
who is behind it, nothing need be impossible. But 
the question is one of balancing probabilities from 
all the evidence which we are bound to take into 
account. Somehow there must be a sure thread 
of consistency which shall bind together all that 
we are meant to learn of the life of Jesus with all 
that the God of truth reveals to us in His work- 
ings always and everywhere. We see that His 
spirit does enable His children, just in so far as 
they are eager and obedient to discover His law, 
to heal diseases of body, mind and soul; and so we 
are the more swift to recognize that He who was 
uniquely the Son of the Infinite could give men 
life and soundness in such essential ways as the 
gospel has described. But we do not see signs that 
it is the Father’s way of working that human 
bodies should walk on water, or that men’s hunger 
should be fed by the short cut of a physical mir- 
acle which immediately multiplies the sustenance 
at hand. Perhaps that was His way with Jesus, 
in exactly such forms as the evangelists report. 
It is also possible that He means for all human 
IOI 


SOME OREN WAYS (LO eG Gao 


life to aspire toward the same such spiritual mas- 
tery over this physical universe, as rapidly as the 
human spirit approximates toward the nature of 
Jesus. No Christian disciple can fail to contem- 
plate that possibility with a reverent awe. Yet, 
on the other hand, it is certainly true that even 
for Jesus Himself the physical order was often not 
malleable, and that the glory of His spirit rose to 
its supreme expression precisely because it did con- 
front a world which in its Gethsemane and its Cal- 
vary was, for the moment, so intractable. Also, 
as we study the long record of the Christian gen- 
erations since the Master lived, it would appear 
that God’s ways are long and patient, dependent 
too not on extraneous marvels but on the disci- 
plined activities of men’s minds and souls. Ap- 
parently He has put us in a world which, in its 
underlying framework, is an ordered system, a 
world in which we cannot feed the hungry merely 
by a touch, but can feed them in a society in which 
all shall work in honorable toil and each shall 
share what he has with his neighbor; a world in 
which fire will burn, and water will drown, and 
death will kill even the saints and heroes whose 
victory is to come not through physical miracles, 
but through the triumph of the spirit over all 
physical things whatever. With these different 
considerations weighing in the balances of judg- 
102 


Ges US he Fe Ris 


ment, it is natural that the scales should incline 
this way for some people and that way for others. 
Some will feel that just because Jesus Himself was 
so different, what He did must therefore have 
been different. They will accept all the reports 
of miracles exactly as they stand and accept them 
the more readily just because they so uniquely 
transcend all usual human experience. But for 
other minds, there will be preponderant weight in 
the thought that Jesus’ life was meant to be nor- 
mative for all those who seek to follow Him, 
that so far at least as we have yet been able to 
discover, there are certain physical limitations past 
which it is not normative that our powers should 
go, and that the gospel accounts concerning Jesus, 
passing as they did through the medium of men 
who were not much concerned with scientific veri- 
fication, may need some re-thinking to lead us back 
to the original fact. Certainly there is no room 
for dogmatic insistence here. In many things 
our vision may be too limited and our spiritual 
experience too immature to understand aright. 
But surely we may know that it carinot be wrong 
to confess uncertainty, since there is enough in the 
gospels which does agree with all that we see of 
the ways of God for us not to be unduly troubled 
if our judgment frankly stands in suspense con- 
cerning certain accounts of miracles which, in their 
103 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


present form, do not fit intelligibly in to the rest 
of our knowledge of the ways of God. 


III 


Besides the questions of miracles wrought by 
Jesus, there is the even greater matter of the 
miracles recounted by the gospels as wrought in 
Him. One of these is the Resurrection, the other 
the Virgin Birth. 

1. Now concerning the Resurrection,—if it 
were an unrelated fact, there would doubtless be a 
tendency in the minds of many to question it, 
simply because our usual human experience seems 
to give us little vivid and immediate evidence of 
a rising from the dead. But it is not an unrelated 
fact. It stands linked with certain other very 
great and evident historic realities which cannot 
be evaded and of which the Resurrection presents 
itself as the explantion. 

These realities have to do with the existence 
of the Christian Church. Here the Church is, a 
fact inwrought into the history of the centuries; 
here it is as one of the dominant influences in the 
life of a great part of the human race since Jesus 
of Nazareth lived on earth. How did the Church 
come into being? It began, of course, in the fel- 
lowship which gathered round Jesus Himself; but 
the death of Jesus, if nothing else had followed 

104 


TESUS TCH RUS D 


that, would have been the end of the fellowship. 
No unprejudiced student of the records can avoid 
that conclusion. When Jesus died and the dis- 
ciples had taken His body down from the cross and 
laid it in the grave, they turned with blank eyes 
to face one another in the midst of what appeared 
an empty world. Life had seemed to come to an 
end for them. It was as though the heavens were 
brass and the earth were full of mocking voices. 
They thought they had followed the Savior, and 
now they were turning away from the tomb 
where, pierced and outraged, the crucified body of 
Him they had loved was laid. There is no sign 
that in these men who had loved Jesus there ex- 
isted then any courage to carry on His work. They 
were paralyzed with a blank hopelessness. Their 
spirits staggered as a man staggers who has been 
struck a mortal blow. The dreams which had 
been so fair in the life they had lived with Him, 
vanished before a ghastly disillusionment. What 
was there left to do but to go back to Galilee and 
begin life over again on the old and commonplace 
plane from which they had risen for a time on 
the wings of an aspiration which seemed forever 
broken? 7 

That, then, is all that there seemed to be for 
present or future when Jesus died. But something 
happened to produce a contrast sudden and 
complete. 

105 


SOME ORIEN “WATS TO "GO 


On the morning of the first day of the week, 
certain disciples of Jesus, going to the tomb where 
they had laid His body, came back with the tidings 
that He was not there. That day the figure of 
Jesus appeared in the garden to Mary Magda- 
lene; He appeared also to Peter; He showed Him- 
self to all the disciples gathered together in an 
upper room. At least that is what the disciples 
said, and the record consists not only in what they 
said but in what they did in the strength of what 
they said. The clear fact stands that men, who on 
the day of the crucifixion were bowed in despair, 
now were lifted up in the transfigurement of a 
new confidence. They began to preach in Jeru- 
salem—in the place where Jesus had died and 
where His enemies were centered—their convic- 
tion that He was risen victorious into life. Upon 
that faith, in spite of persecution and death, they 
built a Church. Upon the wings of that faith 
they went out as missionaries into the world. They 
created the new fact of a spiritual experience 
which depended upon fellowship with the risen 
Christ, and by that they built an organization 
which, with all outward odds against it, neverthe- 
less prevailed and spread and grew. 

It is interesting, also, to note that the most 
characteristic observances of the Christian Church 
testify to the central fact of the Resurrection. 

106 


JESUSy CHRIS LT 


The early disciples, as Jews, had kept the seventh 
day of the week as the Sabbath. Nothing less 
than some overwhelming influence could have made 
them depart from an observance so bulwarked by 
all their inherited sense of an absolute religious 
authority. Yet they changed from the seventh 
day to the first day of the week for the Christian 
day of worship, and all through the years since 
the beginning, every opening of Christian doors 
for worship on the first day of the week is the 
repeated witness to the faith in the Resurrection 
which the first disciples said had happened on that 
day. 

The sacrament of the Communion, also, owes 
its spiritual greatness to belief in the Resurrection. 
Had it been a mere memorial of Jesus’ death, its 
observance would have died out because the hopes 
which had gathered round Jesus Himself would 
have stood defeated; but since those first days 
the Communion has represented for Christian 
disciples a Communion with the living Lord. 
Without the power of that faith, this central act 
in Christian worship would long since have dis- 
appeared. 

Therefore, when men ask themselves whether 
or not they shall believe in the Resurrection, they 
must face the question as to how they can explain 
certain inescapable facts of history without it. If 

107 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


our intellectual processes are to be coherent, we 
are bound to recognize that great results require 
us to find some cause adequate to explain them. 
A light and flippant skepticism might wave aside 
the Resurrection, but it cannot wave aside the 
facts which the Resurrection, or something equal 
to it, is needed to account for. Cowed men are 
not turned into men who lay down their lives for 
a conviction, the spirit of despair is not turned into 
a conquering and unswerving faith, a great organi- 
zation which binds together through the centuries 
multitudes of men and women in the power of what 
they claim to be a living experience, cannot come 
into existence and endure without some vast reality 
out of which so great a consequence could reason- 
ably proceed. Therefore, for the mind which is 
not deliberately biased against the spiritual possi- 
bilities of our universe,—for the mind, that is to 
say, which has not destroyed its impartial receptiv- 
ity to truth by arbitrarily describing beforehand 
the limits within which reality shall move—belief 
in the Resurrection of Jesus can become far more 
rational than any disbelief. For, indeed, there is 
a sense in which the Resurrection was no miracle 
at all. It would have been far more surprising 
and less natural that it should not have happened 
than that it should. For such a spirit as Jesus, 
nothing could seem so normal as a continuing and 
108 


JESUS CHRIST 


victorious life; and the inherent sense of spiritual 
fitness links itself with the facts of history to con- 
firm the faith that the Resurrection did occur. 
Nothing else than the living influence of Jesus 
could have transformed human lives and have 
made that power of the early Church which we 
have already considered; and the simplest way to 
understand that influence is to recognize that ex- 
actly that thing happened which all the New Test- 
ament proclaims. Of the details and manner of 
the Resurrection, the various accounts in the New 
Testament are not always clear; but this great 
fact stands forth, and only in the light of it is the 
history intelligible—namely, that Jesus who had 
been put to death, came back to His disciples in 
a fashion so convincing that they knew that it 
was He. 

2. Then there is the story of the Virgin Birth. 
Concerning this, as everybody knows, there has 
been of late a discussion earnest almost to the 
point of passion. Some people in the Church, as 
well as people outside it, have held that the doc- 
trine of the Virgin Birth has no necessary con- 
nection with belief in Jesus as the Incarnation of 
the life of God, and others insist that, without the 
Virgin Birth, all the fulness of the old belief 
would be built on sand. 

Take the conservative position first. It has the 
ereat strength of seeming to be the bulwark of 

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SOME: OREN UWAYS (20 "GO 


a conception of the value of Jesus which is of 
immeasurable importance. For there are two 
ideas about Jesus, and they differ widely, not 
merely in theological clothing, but in actual prag- 
matic value. One idea would rest content with 
the belief that in Him we have the highest achieve- 
ment of humanity. He is the spiritual mountain- 
peak towering above all lesser heights, thrusting 
up most grandly toward the sky. He is man at 
his highest, man most filled with the consciousness 
that points the way to God. It is obvious that such 
a conception of Jesus is beautiful and inspiring; 
but it is equally obvious that it leaves empty spaces 
in the depths of human desire for what men want 
to know. For this would still leave men saying 
to themselves, “In Jesus we know what man 
ought to be like when he reaches up toward God. 
But do we know what God is like? We are try- 
ing to get to Him. But is He trying to come to 
us? May there, after all, be vast elements in the 
nature of God which do not correspond to this 
aspiration of the human soul which we see in 
Jesus? Jesus was loving. But is God really loy- 
ing? Jesus valued the least of human souls. But 
does God stoop to the lowly? Jesus we can under- 
stand. But can we understand God?’ That is 
where we are left if we think of Jesus as only 
the farthest adventure and discovery of the human 
spirit out into the realms of the infinite. 
I1O 


PEt Clo) CERES ok 


But the result is wholly different when one fol- 
lows the richer faith of Christendom. According 
to that faith, Jesus was not only an excursion of 
human excellence upward. He is the incursion of 
God’s reality coming down to us. In Him we may 
feel that the finite and the infinite are linked, and 
that the great tides from the ocean of God flood 
full into our human life. Believing this, the Chris- 
tian can believe that though, with his limited 
knowledge, he cannot know all that there is of 
God, yet, nevertheless, there will be nothing in 
God which is inconsistent with what he does know 
in Jesus. All the beginning and end of reality 
find their focus in that great soul. What Jesus 
was is not only what man courageously in his lone- 
ly effort must try to be. It is what God is and 
therefore what the God in man is destined to 
become. 

All this the great consensus of Christian thought 
has always believed, and it io a belief without 
which Christianity would be infinitely tmpover- 
ished. So far, as to the chief facts of the past 
and as to the values of the present, there is agree- 
ment. 

But as concerns the question of what the spe- 
cific conceptions are out of which these beliefs are 
reached and in the strength in which their values 
will be preserved, there is a marked, and, in our 
day, a very eloquent division. Conservative theo- 

III 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


logians who hold fast to the letter of the tradi- 
tion, tell us that the only way in which one can 
surely possess the full sense of the meaning of 
Jesus is by holding literally to that belief in His 
entrance into the world by a miraculous birth 
which has for a long time been a teaching of the 
Church. I say “for a long time” rather than 
‘from the first,” because much of the present dis- 
cussion hinges on the point as to whether the Gos- 
pels of Luke and Matthew, as we now have them, 
represent the original tradition, or only a later 
representation of the birth of Jesus of which 
the first gospel traditions and the first apos- 
tolic writings knew nothing. Nevertheless, the 
conservative belief is not only that Jesus was 
born of a human mother (a deep fact which 
the first Christians were eager to safeguard 
in order that the certainty of His humanity might 
be understood), not only that He was born of 
Mary, the white-souled Maid of Nazareth, but 
also that He was born of her through a physical 
miracle. He thinks that without exactly this kind 
of conception of the story of the Virgin Birth, 
it is impossible to believe in Jesus’ uniqueness at 
all. And sometimes the conservative is very em- 
phatic in his insistence that the Christian thinker 
who recognizes less readily than he the authority 
of tradition, has no proper place in the Church’s 
recognition at all. The conservative finds certain 
112 


FES US (CHRISIE 


traditional gates of such absolute value for him 
that he is inclined to think that no other gates 
exist; and, confronted with the apparent fact that 
other persons who did not go through his gate 
somehow have arrived at the same conviction in 
which he wants to dwell, he either declares that 
their apparent presence in any such proper theo- 
logical place is an hallucination contrary to the 
facts, or else that if they are there they climbed 
like trespassers over the wall and ought to be put 
out. Whereas what these other disciples are main- 
taining is that the circuit of the walls is wide, 
and that there really are gates on the other side 
through which they have come into the Holy City, 
and that the Holy City is quite the same place to 
them that it is to their conservative brothers who 
have come up the more travelled way. 

In short, those within the Church who may 
be called today the liberals, differ from the con- 
servatives in this: they believe that the important 
thing is not the direction from which, but the 
destination to which, conviction comes. ‘They 
agree with the conservatives that Jesus is the ful- 
ness of the Godhead bodily, and that God was 
in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself; but 
they are mastered by the conviction that the ques- 
tion of a biological miracle has nothing essentially 
to do with this divineness of Jesus. It seems to 
them that we could believe Him to be not less fully 


113 


SOME OPEN’ WAYS TO GOD 


divine if the Church had never possessed the chap- 
ters concerning the infancy in Matthew and Luke 
and had known of its Master only from the rest of 
the gospels and from the epistles of the New Tes- 
tament, through all of which men seem to be find- 
ing Him their Lord and yet implicitly assuming 
that He was Joseph and Mary’s son. As Jesus 
Himself taught us, God is a Spirit, and the full 
coming of God who is the Spirit, into the soul of 
the Man of Nazareth, is a reality which moves on 
a level with which the physical question has noth- 
ing to do. 

What then shall be said today to the would-be 
disciple of Jesus Christ who finds neither his in- 
tellectual conviction nor his religious emotion laid 
hold of by the traditional teaching which insists 
on a physical miracle of the Virgin Birth? I 
know what I should say, for I know what I say 
to my own soul. I am a child of my own genera- 
tion. I cannot escape the influence of the things 
which we know and believe today. I know that 
many New Testament scholars, spending their 
life in trying to discover, not some argumentative 
support of traditional beliefs, but truth and the 
truth only, find the evidence for a physically mi- 
raculous birth of Jesus open to historic question. 
They point out that it may be, not a fact in that 
plodding sense of prose which our western mind 
is accustomed to, but the poetry of spiritual belief 


114 


JESUS + CE RT Soh 


in which the oriental mind represented the unique- 
ness of the Lord. I remember, too, and this 
is most important, that Mark, who wrote the first 
gospel and wrote it because he thought that there- 
in he had summed up what men needed to know 
of Jesus for the saving of their souls, made no 
slightest mention of the Virgin Birth. I remember 
that the fourth gospel, which bears the name of 
the Beloved Disciple John, has no mention of it, 
and that, on the contrary, its whole conception of 
the relation between Jesus of Nazareth and the 
invisible Father is built upon ideas which have no 
need of a physically miraculous birth to make the 
oneness of the Father and the Son complete. I 
remember too that Paul, that flaming messenger 
of the greatness of his Lord, needed no word con- 
cerning such manner of birth in the gospel which 
he preached. He never wrote of it to any of his 
churches nor seemed to find it vital in his own 
faith. Then in the light of these things, I say 
to myself, and say to any inquiring souls who come 
to me, “It is not needful that we be troubled if 
we have doubts about the Virgin Birth, nor has 
any man or group of men a right to make that 
honest difficulty of the mind into a barrier between 
the soul and the Master whom it seeks.” I can 
not say to myself, and I can not proclaim in my 
preaching, that a man must believe in a physically 
miraculous birth in order to believe in Jesus 


es 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


Christ as Son of God and Savior. I believe that 
the Incarnation may be so interpreted that the 
fulness of God in Jesus may be felt as truly by 
those who do not, as by those who do, believe that 
He was thus born. Our whole philosophical 
background is changed from that in relation to 
which men thought when the creeds were written. 
We do not think in the old way of a mingling of 
substances between the divine and the human as 
the method by which the life that was to bring 
God and man together must have been created. 
The only crucial miracle is the miracle of the 
Spirit. God, as Jesus said, is a Spirit, and if we 
believe it to be true that the Spirit which was in 
Jesus of Nazareth is completely and finally the 
embodiment for us of the Spirit of the eternal 
God, then Jesus is the Lord for us in a fulness 
which no manner of birth one way or the other 
can affect. 

That being so, a man can say the Apostles’ or 
the Nicene Creed and rejoice to Say it, even 
though he may frankly be uncertain whether the 
Virgin Birth was demonstrable fact, or only a rev- 
erent and lovely tradition of the early Church. 
What the creeds in the deep heart of them have 
cherished, that he also cherishes. He believes in 
Jesus coming to this world from God, incarnating 
here God’s fulness as no other life has done, rising 
from death in the triumph of His eternal life, In- 

116 


FES US VC MRS 


terpreter for us of all reality, Foundation-Stone 
upon which we build all that we would try to be 
and do. He was conceived of the Holy Ghost. 
Yes. He was born of the Virgin Mary. Yes. 
But whether, when a man says that, he is confi- 
dent that in literal terms some unprecedented phys- 
ical miracle was wrought, or whether the only thing 
he is sure of is that, over the coming of that Spirit 
of Jesus into this world and His sheltering by the 
love of the Mother who bore Him, God’s spirit 
brooded in such marvelous way that the spiritual 
miracle was wrought of that life of Jesus which 
all the Christian generations have known and 
have adored, equally the Jesus whom he confesses 
can be to him the Savior who is the Incarnation of 
the all-sufiicient God. 

In the Gospel of St. Luke stands the lovely story 
of the Annunciation Angel, of the Maid of Na- 
zareth, and of the Holy Night in Bethlehem when 
the choirs of Christmas angels sang. I would 
treat these exquisite records with a wondering 
reverence, as every sensitive spirit must; I would 
not touch with one fingerweight of contrary in- 
fluence the glad freedom of any Christian disciple 
to accept these as the exact record of literal and 
physical fact. No one can disprove that such they 
were; and surely no Christian will forget that 
round the incomparable figure of Jesus are far 
horizons of mystery where our precise analysis 


117 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


can never reach. Yet to those who find it neither 
helpful nor possible to read the story of the mira- 
culous birth as scientific literalism, it is right to say 
that what the earliest gospel never mentioned, 
what Peter and John and Paul, so far as the New 
Testament writings give any indication, never 
preached, is not necessary for the heart’s full faith 
now in the Incarnate Son of God. The eager, 
yet intellectually perplexed believer, can lift the 
creeds into that realm of poetry where the spirit 
finds its wings, and say to himself, I may think 
of the greatness of Jesus not in terms of my ability 
to afirm a physical miracle of birth for Him, but 
in His ability, as the eternal and self-evidencing 
power of God, to bring the divine birth of the 
Spirit down among men, and to bring it—if I will 
have it so—again today in me. 

By such use as that, the creeds are not belittled; 
rather they are lifted to their noblest and most 
vital worth. For thus they become an evidence of 
that which ever ought to be true of the Christian 
Church——namely, that the fellowship of Jesus is 
built not upon identity in definitions but upon a 
community of devotion. Loving Jesus Christ, two 
men may stand together and confess their faith 
in Him through the Church’s ancient words, and 
by their brotherhood in that confession be each 
the more uplifted, even though from the central 
ground of their common loyalty to their Lord 

118 


JESUS HOH R Usa 


their thoughts may range on different ways. One 
man may accept the creeds with an utter literalism, 
holding even to those conceptions which most 
thoughtful minds of this generation, and the im- 
plicit judgment of a large part of the Church it- 
self, have moved beyond. When he proclaims 
his faith in God the Father, ‘Maker of Heaven 
and earth,” his thought may repudiate the whole 
conception of evolution which multitudes in Chris- 
tendom today accept, and may cling instead to the 
idea of the earth created in six days of twenty- 
four hours each, as for centuries the whole Church 
inflexibly believed. When he repeats that Jesus 
“ascended into heaven,” he may picture the form 
of Jesus as visibly moving upward through the 
clouds until it came to the gates of heaven, there 
only a little beyond men’s sight within the sky. 
When he speaks of ‘“‘the resurrection of the body,” 
he may mean the re-assembling of all those physi- 
cal particles which belong to the mortal body that 
is buried—as also through many centuries the vast 
preponderance of the Church’s teaching pro- 
claimed. And when he speaks of Jesus as “born 
of the Virgin Mary,” he may mean the physical 
miracle which most of the Church’s interpreters 
insist upon now. Certainly no one would question 
the Church’s welcome for the man who thus con- 
ceives the creed. And on exactly the same 
ground, the Church, being wise enough to know 


119 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


that willing devotion is more important than in- 
tellectual infallibility, welcomes equally the other 
man, who conceives the creed not in terms of a 
once orthodox but now largely outgrown past, but 
in terms of what the thought of the Church partly 
now is, and of what he believes in further part it 
will come to be. And this man will claim his 
heritage as simply and rightfully as the tradition- 
alist claims his. He may think that if the Church 
were framing a creed now for the first time it 
might conceivably frame one which should have 
less debatable metaphysic in it than the Nicene 
Creed, and a larger emphasis on the Gospel of 
Jesus—instead of the Church’s doctrine about 
Jesus—than either the Nicene or the Asoptles’ 
Creed expresses. He may think it possible that 
the Church of tomorrow may incorporate into her 
liturgy new creedal expressions born of the desire 
more clearly, more simply, and more command- 
ingly to commit the would-be Christian to that 
program of the Kingdom of God which Jesus 
lived and died for. He will be ready to make 
plain wherein his own thought differs from some 
of the traditional interpretations of the accepted 
creeds, and he will commit his vindication to that 
living and widening judgment of the Church to 
which every unafraid disciple has the right to ap- 
peal, But he recognizes the heritage of history, 
and he prizes fellowship rather than division. He 
I20 


JESUS CHRIST 


perceives that for the corporate worship of the 
congregation, the historic creeds—like ancient 
flags, the very dust upon whose folds is hallowed 
—bring a glory of suggestion which no symbol 
sewed together out of the most exactly colored 
words of our modern thinking could now bring; 
and so with that same essential devotion which the 
worshippers of other centuries have expressed, he 
takes the words of the creed upon his lips. 


IV 


Realizing thus that the supreme concern for 
Christians is not a uniformity of opinion about 
Jesus, but a religious appropriation of the reality 
which was in Him, I should like to conclude this 
chapter by making plain the practical meaning of 
certain great truths which Christian theology has 
long sought to express. 

1. To begin with, there is the Incarnation. The 
Christian faith is that in Jesus the divine and hu- 
man came into a union which is unique in its saving 
importance for all the life of men. We lose the 
meaning of that belief if we make it a mere spec- 
ulation about Jesus. We gain it only as we make 
it the revelation of new possibilities through Him 
for ourselves. 

For the Christian conception holds that Jesus 
of Nazareth was that perfect embodiment of the 

121 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 
life of 'God’and of the'meaning of God fomeie 


human children which all the long aspiration of 
the years had been dimly reaching for. Because 
of the Christ in Him, He seemed unspeakably 
different from all other men; and yet, at the same 
moment, this paradox was true,—that because of 
the Christ that was in Him, he drew others to 
Him and made them feel that somehow they never 
found themselves until they had joined their lives 
with His. The Christ in Him was what He alone 
fully was, but what all men in the truest destiny 
of their spirits are meant to try to be. 

So the Christ that was in Jesus comes and stands 
by every man forever. It is Jesus-like. It speaks 
to us again with the voice of Jesus. It holds out 
to us hands like His. It bids us walk on paths 
where Jesus’ feet have gone. And the Christ in 
Jesus is not some alien principle separated by a 
great gulf from the essential nature in ourselves. 
We only recognize God in Him because that which 
is of God in us, blind, fumbling, imperfect though 
it be, reaches up to claim its own in Him. The 
Christ who walks beside us is forever God and 
man, the beauty and holiness which are so far 
above us coming down to incarnate themselves in 
the struggling ideals that are within. For every 
man the Christ-voice that calls him to come home 
to his Father has in it a strange intimacy of com- 
pulsion which he understands only when at length 

122 


TESuUS. CHRIS 


he realizes, like the son in the far country of the 
parable, that in answering that voice, he has for 
the first time come to himself. Christ who stands 
outside us in the ever familiar personality of Jesus, 
appeals to us not by any outward authority alone, 
but by the awareness that in Him is revealed the 
possible glory of our Christed selves. 

There is no depth nor distance in the earth 
where men can hide from this challenge of the 
Christ spirit. The thing in them that is akin to 
it will draw it after them on an unerring track. 


‘Fear wist not to evade 
As Love wist to pursue.” 


Yet it is true that, to many, Christ may seem at 
first not as a friend but as a pursuing presence 
which they would fain escape, knowing not yet His 
beauty and His healing. ‘There are thousands of 
men and women, even in the Christian churches, 
to whom the thought of Christ is a disturbing 
thing because they will not let Him woo them 
from the false satisfactions in which they try to 
rest. These are the men who secretly see their 
better natures fettered in the midst of their mer- 
cenary pursuits; women cursed with restlessness in 
the midst of a thousand luxuries because they feel 
the emptiness of their existence; young men and 
girls who may try to hide their innate idealism 
under the brazen acceptance of the selfish stand- 

123 


SOME (OPEN, “WAYS *T:0'°GOD 


ards of their world, yet who have their moments 
when in the presence of some noble and courageous 
thing they stand consciously cheapened and 
ashamed. For such lives the message of the Gos- 
pel is still urgent°and powerful. It speaks in the 
same old terms that never lose their vital reality, 
of the Christ who follows in spite of sin, indiffer- 
ence, and denial. “If we believe not, yet he 
abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.” To 
the foolish heart, seeking its fulfilment in vain 
things, He comes with an offer of that joyous re- 
demption which is only found when the heart sur- 
renders all things to the touch of that transfiguring 
Friend. Men will not find Christ by blind obei- 
sance of their intellects to old formulas, no matter 
how stubbornly the teachers may insist upon that. 
Christ is not seeking servants who recognize 
formal authority and clothe themselves in a mere 
livery of His Name. Christ calls men to be His 
friends, and only to His friends can He reveal 
Himself convincingly. If any man would be His 
friend today, if, in spite of any creedal perplexi- 
ties whatever, he will yet look honestly into the 
face of the matchless Christhood of Jesus, he will 
feel that Christ in Him appealing to the Christ 
in his own soul, and will go out with such faith- 
fulness and courage as he may to live his life in 
that spirit of Jesus which is for ever plain to the 
conscience that will be guided by Him. ‘Then the 


124 


JESUS CHRIST 


roads of life shall not be uncompanioned, but on 
them will move the presence of the Lord Him- 
self. 

2. We pass on to another cardinal Christian 
doctrine which must be turned into life. It is the 
doctrine of salvation through the atoning death of 
Christ. I do not intend now to attempt to enter 
into all its theological implications. It has far 
wider meanings than those which I shall even try 
to suggest, but this at least I am sure that it does 
mean: Jesus Christ lived and died not only to 
save men from the penalty of their sins, but from 
their sinning. And in order that He may save 
them and lead them back into the fellowship of 
the love of God, often He must help them pass 
through His own experience of the cross. 

There is a strange short drama by Charles 
Rann Kennedy which seems to me immensely 
moving. It is called “The Terrible Meek.” The 
whole scene of it is set in darkness, and out of 
the darkness come the voices of those who speak. 
The scene is the top of Calvary in that blackness 
which settled upon the world when Jesus died. 
A Roman soldier is there first, then comes the 
voice of the Centurion, then presently out of the 
darkness is the sound of weeping;—it is the 
mother of the one hung there above the ground. 
The soul of the Centurion has been wrestling with 
the awe and terror of the strange scene which he 

125 


SOME OPEN WAYS £0 °GOD 


has witnessed, and out of his inner turmoil a pas- 
sionate new conviction of scorn for the things 
which he had served, of dawning faith in things 
which he had only begun to dream, flames out in 
the words he speaks to Mary. 


‘And so we go on building our kingdoms—the 
kingdoms of this world. We stretch out our 
hands, greedy, grasping, tyrannical, to possess the 
earth. Domination, power, glory, money, mer- 
chandise, luxury, these are the things we aim at; 
but what we really gain is pest and famine, grudge 
labor, the enslaved hate of men and women, 
ghosts, dead and death-breathing ghosts that 
haunt our lives forever. . . . We have lost both 
earth and ourselves in trying to possess it; for the 
soul of the earth is man and the love of him, and 
we have made of both a desolation. I tell you, 
woman, this dead son of yours, disfigured, shamed, 
spat upon, has built a kingdom this day that can 
never die. The living glory of him rules it. The 
earth is his and he made it. He and his brothers 
have been moulding and making it through the 
long ages: they are the only ones who ever really 
did possess it: not the proud, not the idle, not the 
wealthy, not the vaunting empires of the world. 
Something has happened up here on this hill today 
to shake all our kingdoms of blood and fear to 
the dust. The earth is His, the earth is theirs, 
and they made it. ‘The meek, the terrible meek, 
the fierce agonizing meck, are about to enter into 
their inheritance.” 


It is true that the earth is His, for He made it. 
126 


RES URS) A CueL Rilsih 


The meek, the terrible meek, the terrible self- 
sacrificing Christ, shall enter into His inheritance 
when those who bear His name are brave enough 
to claim it. 

Said St. Paul long ago when he faced the stub- 
born pride of the old conservatism of the Jews, 
and the cynical disbelief of the Greeks who 
imagined that there was no reality which their 
philosophy could not explain: ‘We preach Christ 
crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and 
unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto those who 
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the pow- 
er of God and the wisdom of God.” 

There is power in the gospel of Jesus to build 
the world anew. It has built anew the temples 
of individual souls. It can build, if it shall find 
the architects who are great enough to plan it, 
the temple of the soul of all the race. But in 
order for that to come true there must be the 
willingness on the part of Christian men and 
women to dare and to suffer, if need be, as Christ 
did, for great ideals which seem forlorn. Our 
social life cannot be fashioned into brotherhood, 
our economic and industrial system cannot be 
brought into some likeness to the Kingdom of 
God, our whole world cannot be delivered from 
the greed and passions which lead to war, until 
people, inspired by the spirit of Christ, are willing 
to espouse that which the derisive laughter of this 

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SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


world calls visionary and in the service of an 
abiding faith to fill up by their own sacrifices “that 
which is lacking of the affliction of Christ.” For 
the great ideals do not enter into the world full- 
orbed and convincing. They come to the world 
through the venture of faith of those who are 
great enough of soul to believe and who, having 
believed, will seek against weary postponement 
and long delay to advance the cause of that un- 
wearying faith. In the vision of the Book of 
Revelation those who sat about the throne of the 
Lamb were those who had come out of great tribu- 
lation. It will not be strange if in the final reck- 
oning those who shall redeem the earth from 
many of the evils which curse it now, shall have 
brought that earth to God out of a tribulation 
which shall be very real in heart, and soul, and 
action. 

3. Linked with the thought of the atoning death 
of Jesus, it is fitting that we should understand 
also the spiritual message of His resurrection. 
Already we have considered the fact of the resur- 
rection as it pertained to Jesus Himself and have 
reviewed the reasons why no fair accounting of 
the facts of history can escape the conclusion that 
He who was crucified and buried in the garden 
tomb did come back and manifest Himself alive 
to His disciples; but the significance of the resur- 
rection in the thought and life of Christendom 

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JESUS CHRIST 


widens out far beyond belief in the solitary fact 
of the rising again of Jesus. The Christian ex- 
perience has been guided by the light of those 
words of Jesus Himself, ‘Because I live, ye shall 
live also.”” His whole personality made the hu- 
man spirit seem essentially so great, and life 
rather than death so surely its normal expectation, 
that all spiritual consciousness has been lifted to 
a new dignity of faith in its own immortality. In 
the letters of William James there is a reply which 
he wrote to the questions of a correspondent who 
asked him about his own religious beliefs. Con- 
cerning personal immortality, he answered that he 
believed in it more strongly as he grew older, and 
this was the reason that he gave for that belief— 
“because I am just getting fit to live.” It was 
from the influence of Jesus Christ more than from 
any other cause in history that men have learned 
to think of life as so noble a matter that the uni- 
verse would be unintelligible if death of necessity 
destroyed it. There is an invincible impulse to 
believe that the human soul in its highest spiritual 
exercise is lifted to a level of existence on which 
physical death has no power to touch it. It is a 
fact to which all the centuries bear witness that the 
more fully men have tried to live like Jesus, and 
the more earnestly they have sought to lift their 
own spirits to that exalted plane on which His 
moved, the more surely they have felt this convic- 
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SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


tion of immortality. With quiet inner confidence 
they have believed that they were “‘just getting fit 
to live’ and that death’s toll-gathering fingers 
should simply strip from them mortality and set 
the spirit free. 

Nor is the significance of the resurrection 
limited to that faith which it brings to men in a 
life that continues beyond the confines of this 
world. It has taught those, who turn to Jesus 
Christ for guidance, to live here ‘in the power of 
an endless life.’ It has taught men to strive and 
dare more gallantly because they can trust that 
all victory is on the side of those who live for 
God. They remember that through Gethsemane, 
and over the brow of the dark and tragic hill, 
Christ went His way to triumph. His victory is 
the eternal symbol of that which is unseen over the 
brutal weight of the near and obvious, the victory 
of the quietness of God over the tumult of the 
world’s rejection. Always the thought of Easter 
has enabled men to trust in the unarmed power of 
goodness. It makes them know that, in spite of 
any momentary appearance to the contrary, no 
pure act of goodness is ever lost. Let men 
stand in some measure of Christ’s likeness for 
truth and right, and the contribution which they 
make to the ennobling of their generation will 
have its Easter-day of vindication. For no impulse 
whatever that is conceived according to the grace 

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JESUS CHRIST 


of God, is Calvary the last word. The resurrec- 
tion of Jesus is, for all who look to Him, the im- 
mortal witness that the quiet power of goodness 
shall at last ascend its throne. 

4. Finally, there is the faith in a mighty second 
coming of Jesus Christ. The New Testament 
formulations of that faith are confusing. We 
cannot tell how far the current apocalyptic expec- 
tation of the Jews may have colored the disciples’ 
minds and may have affected their report to us 
of the words of Jesus. But certainly this great 
faith has always been characteristic of Christian- 
ity,—that somehow and in some manner, the 
Christ spirit which stooped to what seemed its 
humiliation in the death of Jesus, should come 
back to the world in power and manifest authority. 

Now the thing which it seems to me we need 
to understand, is that this coming of the power 
of Jesus depends not so much upon Him as upon 
us. It is not a matter of the miraculous approach 
of an absent Christ for which we have nothing to 
do but to wait. It is a matter, rather, of recog- 
nizing that Christ is always present, wherever and 
whenever the faith of men will open the gates to 
let Him in. 

When the grace of God came among men in the 
human figure of Jesus of Nazareth, the hard-eyed 
men of His world saw in Him nothing important. 
‘When Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence 


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SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


He is,” they said, “howbeit we know this man 
whence He is.” Was He not the carpenter’s 
son? Had He not come out of despised Naza- 
reth? Was He not the friend of common people, 
who ate with publicans and sinners and obviously 
was no person of whom either the socially re- 
spectable or the ecclesiastically important people 
need take notice? The very suggestion that this 
man out of Galilee should be called the Messiah 
toward whom the hopes of Israel for centuries 
had pointed forward, seemed to them either in- 
sanity or blasphemy, or both. When Messiah 
should come, men would know Him by His great- 
ness, by the heavenly powers that gathered at His 
back, by the crown of dominion He should wear, 
by the sceptre of miraculous sovereignty which He 
should wield. To suggest that the carpenter 
might be the Messiah, this man sprung from the 
common people might be the King—what was this 
but to degrade into a travesty the long grandeur 
of the messianic hope? So they reasoned, and 
men of worldly wisdom said they reasoned well. 
On the brow of Jesus, meanwhile, there was a 
crown; but they could not see it. In His grasp 
there was a sceptre; but they saw the empty hand, 
or, at the last, the blood-prints of the nails. Like 
Pilate, they could not understand a kingdom that 
was not of this world. Before their eyes, in the 
L232 


JESUS CHRIST 


majesty of His spiritual lordship, He went His 
way: but they did not and would not see. 

Yet nothing is clearer concerning Jesus than 
the fact of His own consciousness that in Him the 
glory of God’s presence had come into the midst 
of men. He did not seek for any outward pan- 
oply of royalty, for He did not need it. In John 
the Baptist, notwithstanding the fact that he died 
in a prison, He saw the Elijah of the new dis- 
pensation. In Himself, He beheld the true long- 
ing for the Messiah satisfied. To believe in Him, 
to understand His spirit and to share it, was to 
enter into the greatness of the Kingdom of God. 

Every age has in itself the possibility of becom- 
ing by its own creative choice the age of a tri- 
umphant new advent of Christ. The time is not 
a matter of arithmetical calculation. It is a mat- 
ter of spiritual preparation. We need not look 
wistfully to the future. We only need to deal 
grandly with today. Christ is forever coming 
again. He stands at the door and knocks. Our 
business is to let Him in, and the reason that so 
often we do not let Him in is because stubbornly, 
like the men of old, we are looking for some 
haughty presence which will minister to our own 
pride instead of looking for Him who comes 
again, as He came at the beginning, in the lowli- 
ness of the spirit that worldly wisdom mocks at 


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SOME. O PEIN W AS TO SGione 


and only eyes fresh to the value of God behold 
as the presence of the King. 

Is it not greatly possible that in this time of 
ours Christ may come to men’s intellectual com- 
prehension with a vividness such as few of the 
ages have known? ‘The promise of such a result 
lies in the urgent genuineness of our time’s desire. 
Men want today a Christ who will answer our 
present needs. ‘Chey want one who is close to our 
immediate apprehension and of whom they can 
think in such a way that their own problems and 
“necessities become interpreted through His light. 
They are not greatly interested in what Greek 
theologians said about Him fifteen hundred years 
ago. It is not that they deny the orthodox cor- 
rectness of those formulas, but simply that those 
formulas seem to them to have no easily under- 
stood meaning for present thought. They are 
not in the language of our experience. They do 
not touch us at the living points of our desire. 
They may bring a Christ who is flawless in their 
abstract definition; but they do not bring a Christ 
whom the twentieth century can understand; and 
it is this Christ that we must have. 

If this new coming of Christ be possible, why 
then is it held back? Is the reason not the same 
that it has always been, namely, that men are 
looking afar for some miracle on the horizon in- 
stead of beholding with marvelling eyes the mira- 


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Jive USC EPR USE 


cle of the new desire in their midst? Many would 
insist, by the stubborn error of their mistaken 
reverence, that Christ is not come and cannot come 
until He comes in the form in which they hold 
that it is alone proper that He appear. So the 
conservative theologians today refuse to recognize 
the force in that great hunger for Christ which 
would interpret faith in Him in simple terms which 
men can understand. They would clothe Him in 
the Kingliness of their inherited formularies, or 
else it shall not be allowed that He is here at all. 
They insist on interpreting His godhead in such 
a way as makes Him alien to our human experi- 
ence, setting Him apart from present existence by 
emphasis upon ancient miracles, declaring that no 
man can believe in Him except in the metaphysical 
terms of Greek philosophy, and so denying the 
simplicity with which He can come to the heart 
that is eager for the Spirit of Jesus now. The 
time has come when the Church must beware lest 
the creeds themselves should become a disguise 
to hide the coming of Christ. She must beware 
lest she teaches men to say, I cannot believe in 
Christ till in some tremendous way He has 
stormed my understanding. She must beware lest 
she make Christ seem remote when really He is 
near. Just as the kind of Messiah whom the 
Jews expected, one clothed in the majesty of cloud 
and lightning, seemed still far off when the Mes- 


135 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


siah was actually in their midst, so the kind of 
Christ whom the traditional theologians have in- 
sisted on, Christ clothed in the cloudy metaphors 
of Nicene theology, must also seem far off from 
the faith of this different age of ours, when in fact 
the real Christ is knocking at our hearts. In one 
of his essays published during the war, Donald 
Hankey made plain how essentially Christian are 
the instincts in many men who have not the slight- 
est idea that it is possible that they should call 
themselves Christian. They have associated 
Christianity with the miraculous, the strange, the 
unintelligible, and they do not know that Chris- 
tianity is so simple a thing as the mastership of 
Jesus over their hearts, proving His Godhead 
through the living fact that He alone releases the 
God in men. If the Church could only remember 
this and teach it, then the Christ who was unrec- 
ognized once because men refused to recognize 
the simplicity of the spirit He came in, may be 
recognized now through the truer vision which 
perceives that the mightiness of His advent into 
human faith might be at hand. 

As there is a possibility of the larger coming 
of the spirit of Christ into our intellectual under- 
standing now, so there is the possibility of His 
larger coming into the realm of the re-adjustment 
of our practical concerns. 

There were men in Jerusalem, able men and 

136 


JESUS ICH RUST 


leading citizens, who lived at the time when the 
Carpenter of Nazareth came up to the great city 
which was the centre of Israel’s affairs. They be- 
lieved in religion too. They were sure that the 
Temple was the most important institution in the 
people’s life. ‘They had an alliance between the 
Temple and the business that gathered round its 
courts. They were determined at all hazards to 
maintain it. They recognized in a general way 
that there were a great many things in life that 
were wrong, and they were busily hopeful that 
some day, probably a long time off, the Messiah 
would come and set these things right in a way 
which everyone would approve; but meanwhile 
there was a disturbing person in their midst. He 
had claimed to be the Messiah. He dared say 
that this Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which 
broke down barriers and exalted common people, 
and proclaimed that peasants and fishermen and 
even the outcasts were of as much value in God’s 
eyes as the men who had made themselves rich and 
great, would bring in the new heavens and the new 
earth. They looked at Him with outraged indig- 
nation. How did He dare to set His judgment 
up against theirs? Who was He that His haughty 
self-importance should be regarded? What fi- 
nancial stake did He have in the country? He 
did not have any place to lay His head. What 
did He have to lose if this dissatisfaction that He 


137 


SOME "OPEN OUWAY'S (10 tGaorD 


was sowing among the people began to be serious? 
But they had everything to lose. So it was a man- 
ifest matter of good citizenship that this disturb- 
ing prophet of Nazareth should be crucified; and 
crucified He was. 

Christ stands today outside the shut gates of 
much of our economic system. He stands there in 
the great hunger of the unprivileged multitude 
for wholesomeness of life. He knocks in the vast 
demand of millions for a chance not to work and 
live like driven brutes, but in a manner that shall 
give some freedom to let the mind and soul ex- 
pand. He stands there in the modern demand for 
justice and for brotherhood and for the recogni- 
tion of the human value of the lowliest toiler as 
being more sovereign in a Christian democracy 
than the richest financial stake. When He enters 
in, there will be readjustment which will be hard 
for some to face, and that is why the gates are 
often barred against Him by frightened privileged 
hands. When He comes in, as come some day He 
shall, He will make for all of us a life of which 
we can be more glad than of the hard inequalities 
and the often unconscious cruelties in the midst 
of which now we live. He can make for us a life 
in which it will be possible for all men for the 
first time to live as Christians, because they will 
be living as brothers in a society conceived more 

138 


JESUS CHRIST 


nobly and more truly than now it is in terms of 
the common good. 

So comes again the question to us at it came to 
the conscience of Pilate, ‘‘What shall I do then 
with Jesus which is called Christ?” Mark the 
inexorable requirement of that word, “what then 
shall I do?” We may nail Him upon His cross; 
or we may take that cross of His on our shoulders 
and walk with Him upon His way. It is one or 
the other, for He will have’ no half-measures, 
and we cannot ignore Him nor make as though 
we did not know that He is in our midst. Wheth- 
er a man may know much or little of theology, 
when his conscience stands before the challenge of 
the life of Jesus Christ, he knows within himself 
that nothing less authoritative than God reaches 
out through Christ to claim him. And when he 
obeys, through Christ, that call of God, he makes 
the one effective recognition of the divineness of 
Jesus which Jesus Himself would be concerned to 
have. 


139 


CHAPTER IV 
THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


In CHRISTIAN teaching as it is usually given and 
received, there is probably no subject which leaves 
the average person more vaguely perplexed than 
the subject of the Holy Ghost. It is relatively easy 
to think vividly of Jesus Christ. It is not so diff- 
cult also to have a fairly definite conception of God 
the Father as the power that created all men, and 
the love which reaches out through that redemp- 
tion which Jesus came to show. But how to fit 
in the thought of the Holy Ghost to the rest of our 
thinking is a matter that leaves many religious 
people nonplussed. 

The representations in art do not give much 
help. In the Boston Public Library, opposite the 
noble frieze of the prophets, Sargent has painted 
an appalling thing which is alleged to represent 
the Trinity. There are three remote and passion- 
less figures sitting side by side, all alike, and all 
joined with one interminable robe, and one of these 
is supposed to be the Holy Ghost. From that 
kind of symbol, as indeed from much crude preach- 
ing, in which the Holy Ghost is spoken of as 
though He were one among three Gods, the man 
or woman seeking light would gain as little as 

140 


dee LIND W EU LDN Gis RiP Re 


from a pagan idol. The symbol in the paintings 
of the older centuries is better. There the Holy 
Ghost is usually represented as a hovering dove. 
That has the value at least of suggesting the bene- 
diction of God brooding over the life of men. 
But how are we going to translate the symbol back | 
into theology? What or who is the Holy Ghost? 

If we look for definitions, we can find them; 
but they are not always helpful. For example, in 
the Articles of Religion as printed in the Book of 
Common Prayer we may turn to Article V, Of the 
Holy Ghost, and read as follows: “The Holy 
Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, 
is of one substance, majesty, and glory, with the 
Father and the Son, very and eternal God.” All 
of which may be true to the utmost, but still it 
does not seem to get us anywhere. It only leads 
us round a circle of sonorous words and lands us 
back at our original problem of understanding just 
what the thought of the Holy Ghost has to do 
with our appropriation of the full richness of God 
for actual religion. 

The first thing which I think we need to do 1s 
to replace in our own minds that name “Holy 
Ghost”? with the better name “‘the Holy Spirit.” 
We shall find the old words remaining still, of 
course, in the formularies of the Church, where 
long usage brings the language of earlier cen- 
turies down into our own time even after it has 


141 


SOME OPEN WAYS) 1.0) Gio 


grown antique; but we can think in terms of the 
Holy Spirit even on occasions when we say the 
syllables, “the Holy Ghost,” for the word ‘“‘ghost”’ 
originally meant spirit, in all its living and breath- 
ing sense. It did not mean any disembodied 
shadow. It meant the very soul of life; and this 
is what religious experience has been trying to ex- 
press when it has spoken of the Holy Spirit. It 
has meant a reality which has come out from God, 
vital, quickening, and most immediately real. 
Moreover, we must remember that faith in the 
Holy Spirit did not begin with an abstraction. 
Men were not playing theoretically with the idea 
of God and devising ingenious elaborations, of 
which the Holy Spirit was one. On the contrary, 
all that was said about the Holy Spirit was a re- 
flection of what at first was very deeply felt. Back 
of theology lay the religious experience which 
theology was simply the effort to explain. There- 
fore, as we begin to think of the Holy Spirit, just 
as when we were thinking of the divinity of Jesus, 
we must begin by remembering what men experi- 
enced, and interpret what they tried to say always 
in relation to that original and predominant fact. 


I 


1. If we turn to the New Testament, it is easy 
to see that, when men talked of the Holy Spirit, 


142 


Tere eh NCD EW Eis PNG S Bik ie k 


they were talking of something which had made 
a tremendous difference in the immediate matter 
of their daily living. They were conscious of a 
baptism from on high. ‘They knew that something 
had entered into them which enabled them to live 
differently from the way in which they had ever 
lived before, and they believed that this something 
was the personal inbreathing of the very life of 
God Himself. The music of this consciousness 
which set itself to the name of the Holy Spirit 
rings through the New Testament like a chime of 
bells. It throbs with mighty notes of power. It 
sings, a carolling of joy, that wakens the morning 
with the music of a golden hope, and floats like 
the evening angelus, full of serenity and quietude 
and peace. On that last night in the upper room, 
Jesus had promised the coming of the Holy Spirit. 
“T will pray the Father,” He had said, “‘and he 
shall give you another Comforter, that he may 
abide with you for ever.”’ And He did come, this 
mighty Comforter, not only in the sense which 
we give now to that word, as one who brings con- 
solation, but in the stronger, earlier sense which 
the word conveyed of the Empowerer. On Pente- 
cost, the disciples felt the fulfilment of Jesus’ 
promise. There came upon them such an impulse 
from on high that they spoke the message of Jesus 
boldly, and with new courage and imagination set 
themselves to build up a fellowship in which men 


143 


SOME OPEN WAYS (TO GOD 


should show to one another the spirit of the love 
of Jesus. When new disciples came into the 
Christian company, it was expected that their new 
life should bring them a definite access of power 
and joy. Peter and John, coming down to Sa- 
maria, where there was a little company of dis- 
ciples, asked them, as the matter first to be ex- 
pected, whether they had received the Holy Ghost; 
and learning that they had not, the apostles laid 
their hands on them and prayed that the divine 
gift might then and there be given. To use the 
words which a Christian hero in later years made 
immortal, those first disciples dared ‘attempt 
great things for God,” and therefore they did not 
fear “‘to expect great things from God.” They 
trusted that, over and above their ordinary human 
efforts, there was a definite divine reality ready 
to enter into them, to make them be what they 
could never be alone. “The law of the Spirit of 
life in Christ Jesus,’’ said Paul, ‘hath made me 
free from the law of sin and death.” “Ye are not 
in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit 
of God dwelleth in you.” “For ye have not re- 
ceived the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye 
have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we 
cry, Abba, Father.” ‘The Spirit itself beareth wit- 
ness with our spirit, that we are the children of 
God.”’ He wrote to the Corinthians that he had 
come to them “in demonstration of the Spirit and 


144 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


of power: that your faith should not stand in 
the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” 
“Now we have received not the spirit of the 
world, but the spirit which is of God; that we 
might know the things that are freely given to 
us of God.” For “the fruit of the Spirit,’ he said, 
“is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, 
goodness, faith.” 

Such are the results men felt when they trusted 
in the Holy Spirit. They did not produce these re- 
sults themselves. They were produced in them 
from above. That was their practical theology. 
They had found God because He first found them. 
In the fulness of God’s nature, there must be a 
Holy Spirit because that new spirit which moved 
and breathed in them was nothing less than God. 
The throbbing fact of their threefold religious 
consciousness was summed up in that beautiful 
blessing of the Apostle, “The grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellow- 
ship of the Holy Ghost, be with you all ever- 
more.” 

2. Thought of that way, the doctrine of the 
Holy Spirit is very evidently a thing of grace and 
beauty. It is only when men get tangled in theo- 
logical subtleties and are offered some arid form 
of words instead of the living fact that the signifi- 
cance of the Holy Spirit is robbed of its tremen- 
dous meaning.. Yet the theologians and the com- 


145 


SO MEO PEN OWA YS 2 DO VG oie 


mentators generally can do us service provided 
that we do not let them be our masters. What 
we can do is to look at their explanations for what 
they are worth, profit by such gleams of true sug- 
gestion as do break through their words, and 
cheerfully refuse to follow when all that they do 
is to invite us into a fog. We may well remem- 
ber also that, through the most bewildering theo- 
logical terms there is a genuine spiritual intuition 
which is trying to find the way to truth for us; and 
if we can strike hands with -that, it will lead us 
right,—just as a child can show us a path when, 
if he tried to tell us of it, and describe its turns 
this way and that, he would only leave our minds 
distracted. To take such a formidable description 
as this for example, which comes—like the words 
we quoted a while ago—from the Articles of Re- 
ligion in the Book of Common Prayer: “There 
is but one living and true God. ... And in 
unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of 
one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, 
the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ That seems sheer 
contradiction, and taken as it stands in our modern 
language, some of it is. But when we press 
through the baffling words to the experience which 
the laboring teachers tried to communicate, we 
begin to get at something real. That word ‘‘per- 
son” did not originally mean three separate identi- 
ties, as we think of when we use the English word. 
146 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


The old persona of the Latin from which our word 
“person” comes, was a term of the stage, and 
had reference to the different parts which one 
actor might play in the same drama. There were 
separate representations, but back of them was 
the same life. That is the symbolism which the 
early Christian theologians used, and which all 
their successors since have more or less conscious- 
ly been employing to express their conviction of 
the equal authority of the three ways in which God 
had been made known to them. They had looked 
into the face of Jesus Christ, and they had found 
God there. Through His eyes they had looked 
upon their world and trusted that, in spite of all 
its sorrow and its perplexity, nevertheless back of 
it is a love like the love of Jesus, which holds 
men’s destinies in His hands. And so they be- 
lieved in God the Father. And then they looked 
within themselves and were conscious that the same 
God whom they had seen in Jesus and trusted in 
the heavens entered with His actual presence into 
them. ‘That is the heart of Christian theology. 
It believes in the richness and yet in the oneness 
of God. It trusts that the universe is not made 
up of a multitude of jarring forces, with devils 
and demons and all sorts of ultimate contradic- 
tions, but that there is one reconciling principle 
running through it all, and that Christ who is be- 
fore us, and God who is above us, and that urgent 


147 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


Spirit which is within us, are all one God. For 
those who love God all things, whether of the 
inner life or of the outer world, may be trusted 
to work together for good. 

That facile and brilliant writer, H. G. Wells, 
whose books have probably been read by as many 
people as the books of any other living man, turned 
some years ago from his novels to produce his 
“God the Invisible King’; and in it there is a 
passage which might well stand as a description 
of that experience which Christian thought has 
always associated with the Holy Spirit: 


“Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own 
time, God comes. This cardinal experience is an 
undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the 
attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not 
alone in oneself. It is as if one was touched at 
every point by a being akin to oneself, sympa- 
thetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure 
inna ithe wa 

“The moment may come while we are alone in 
the darkness, under the stars, or while we walk 
by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and 
muse. It may come upon the sinking ship or in 
the tumult of the battle. There is no saying when 
it may not come tous. ... But after it has come 
our lives are changed, God is with us and there 
is no more doubt of God. Thereafter one goes 
about the world like one who was lonely and has 
found a lover, like one who was perplexed and 

148 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


has found a solution. One is assured that there 
is a Power that fights with us against the confu- 
sion and evil within us and without.” 


But H. G. Wells would not admit that this 
description has any direct relation to the Christian 
faith in the Holy Spirit. He would discard the 
terms of Christian theology altogether. He has 
no patience with that historic conception of God 
as the triune life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
“An issue upon which this book will be found 
particularly uncompromising,” he says in his pre- 
face, ‘‘ is the dogma of the Trinity.” It is “an 
incoherent accumulation of antique theological no- 
tions.’ So Mr. Wells proceeds to fashion his own 
idea of God which he thinks will be more cohe- 
rent. ‘Modern religion,’ he says, “appeals to 
no revelation, no authoritative teaching, no mys- 
tery.’ He cannot blink the fact that there is 
mystery in our universe; but he would put it out 
of his religion. ‘At the back of all known things 
there is an impenetrable curtain; the ultimate of 
existence is a Veiled Being, which seems to know 
nothing of life or death or good or ill. The new 
religion . . . does not even assert that God 
knows all or much more than we do about that 
ultimate Being.” God is finite. He is the spirit 
of the higher life in man. He is a limited in- 
fluence pressing for expression through humanity, 
in a universe which He did not create and which 


149 


SOME OPEN) WAYS) DOGG 


we cannot be sure that He explains. That is God, 
and that is all the God there is. 

Now Mr. Wells is no authoritative theologian, 
but he is a highly skilful interpreter of the popular 
mind. Miultitudes of people are impatient—yjust 
as he represents himself to be—with the complex- 
ities of theology which disguise the reality of re- 
ligion. They are captivated by the idea of getting 
rid of complexities. But the trouble is that in get- 
ting rid of the complexities, they forget the like- 
lihood that they may unwittingly get rid of a 
large part of the religion too. 

It is worth our while to dwell on this danger 
of a too glib attempt to produce a simplified re- 
ligion, stripped of mystery. Against its thin re- 
sult, the full meaning of a right conception of 
the Holy Spirit appears in rich relief. ‘The Chris- 
tian belief in the Holy Spirit embraces all those 
positive values which Mr. Wells—and those for 
whom he speaks—ascribe to God. The Holy 
Spirit is “the immortal part and leader of man- 
kind.” He is the divine urge within our human 
hearts; and therefore He is God. But He is not 
all there is of God. 

Here enters in the august worth of that con- 
ception of the Triune God which the instinct of 
historic Christianity has clung to in spite of the 
struggling inability of theologians to explain it. 
The unconquerable hunger of mind and heart for 

I50 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


religion cannot be answered by a debonair method 
which disposes of our ultimate questionings 
through the convenient device of saying that God 
has nothing to do with them. In the long run, 
the religious hunger will press on to find a God 
who not only interprets the aspirations of the soul 
within us, but who also can give us through Him- 
self the sense of a right and sure relationship to 
the wholeness of this universe with which we 
have to do. 

It is to such a God that Christian faith leads 
us. The Holy Spirit within us is God come down 
to the limits of our present experience; but beyond 
the Holy Spirit is the mightier Fulness of God 
whose sufficiency we can trust for those mysteries 
which now we cannot understand. 

In the richness of such a thought of God, cer- 
tain values which are often torn apart and mutil- 
ated by impatient thinkers, find their wide inclu- 
sion. So it is with what the theologians have 
called the transcendence and the immanence of 
God. Each of these represents something which 
the permanent hunger of the human heart would 
find in God; and either, without the other, leaves 
one great element of religious need unsatisfied. A 
God who is conceived of as transcendent in the 
sense of some distant Absolute, an awful power 
ruling from a far-off throne, the “Allah” of the 
Mohammedan, whose will is to be bowed to and 


ISI 


SOME OREN WAY SY LO (6 @up 
obeyed, or the Jehovah of the earlier Old Testa- 


ment conception, who “‘sitteth upon the circle of 
the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grass- 
hoppers,” brings no intimate joy to the worship- 
ping soul. Somehow He must draw near, and 
become immanent in the daily strivings of men, 
if the ineradicable religious longing for a divine 
companionship is to be satisfied. Yet, on the other 
hand, if God is thought of as immanent only, re- 
ligion may degenerate into the welter of panthe- 
ism where all discriminations of higher and lower 
are lost, and worship becomes the mere sponge- 
like acceptance of whatever the shifting currents 
of the time happen to bring into the consciousness. 
Over and above the instincts colored and fed by 
the world as it is, over and above the wash of 
vague religious sentiment, must rise the challenge 
and correction of some transcendent thought of 
the greatness and glory of God. All this the 
Christian conception of God remembers and ex- 
presses. Jesus taught His disciples to believe in 
and to expect the Spirit which should come to 
them as the indwelling God. But He also believed 
in One, from whom that Spirit comes out, who is 
“Lord of heaven and earth,” who not only sends 
to men the inspiration for their daily striving but 
who can and does so control the mysteries of life 
and death and the final forces of our universe that 
men can commend their spirits into His hands and 
152 


PEE oOUN DWE LENG: SBR oe 


know that through Him their striving is not in 
vain. That faith does not lend itself to compla- 
cent definition, finished—_as Mr. Wells would fin- 
ish his “new religion’’—all with sharp edges like a 
pattern cut with scissors from a piece of paper. 
But it is like a sign-post pointing to a road, of 
itself no explanation but only an invitation to that 
road; and on the road are far vistas where the 
understanding walks in twilight, and long perspec- 
tives melting into mystery over the hills; but along 
the road are the fruits of an increasing confidence 
to feed those who walk. that way, and from the 
end of it shines the truth that leads to life. 
Furthermore, the Christian thought of the Tri- 
une God helps to link into one unity of Christian 
experience two other conceptions which otherwise 
might be antagonistic. A contrast has been drawn 
in some of our contemporary philosophy and re- 
ligion between God Being, and God Becoming. 
Bergson in his “Creative Evolution” wrote: 
“Things and states are only views, taken by our 
mind, of becoming. ‘There are no things, there 
are only actions. “God... has nothing of the 
already made: He is unceasing life, action, free- 
dom.” According to this conception, God Him- 
self, like the world, is forever in the making. ‘The 
spiritual experience of men from day to day as 
they try to follow their noblest instincts is creat- 
ing the divine reality which we call God. And in 


153 


SOM E* OP EINGW iA YS 0b Ol Gone 


this conception of an unfinished reality, in the 
realm even of the highest, there is thrilling sug- 
gestion of the significance which human living may 
possess; for it would seem to mean that the very 
glory of God Himself is not yet complete, but 
waits for our codperation to be achieved. 

Yet, on the other hand, in “The Meaning of 
God in Human Experience,” W. E. Hocking has 
written, “Unlimited codperation with God in 
world-making we have: not however in ultimate 
God-making. The religious object offers that 
Identity without which creative freedom itself 
would lack, for us, all meaning. ... If we are 
offered a man-made God and a self-answering 
prayer, we will rather have no God and no prayer. 
There can be no valid worship except that in which 
man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the 
Most Real, beyond his will.” 

“The presence of the Most Real, beyond his 
will.” Certainly it is true that without the sense 
of that, the substance vanishes from religion. 
Men need a reality external to themselves and 
to their devisings, in which to trust. Travellers 
to India tell of Hindu wonder-workers who can 
appear to those who watch them to throw a rope- 
ladder into the air, and then to climb up that rope 
suspended there in emptiness; but religious faith 
can ultimately climb the ladder of its aspiration 
only as that ladder rests upon the solid fact of 


154 


TEER GNDWELLING SPER DT 


an existing God. Back of the consciousness of 
divine becomings, there must be the assuring sense 
of a God whose Being already gives support to 
what we hope and will to do. 

Is it not plain that these two values meet in the 
full-orbed Christian consciousness of God? In the 
Holy Spirit, there is an aspect of God in which He 
is still becoming—a divine experience growing, en- 
larging, entering into and interpreting the new 
and orginal material of expanding life. Yet that 
toward which the divine-in-man is growing is no 
chance goal blindly fumbled for in the dark. God 
who already is, God to whom the Spirit “maketh 
intercession for us,” is that Ideal already living 
by which all the becomings of the God-in-man are 
guided and inspired. Our human strivings after 
righteousness can look up to a righteousness which 
is an eternal fact; our answering affections can 
turn to a love which was and is the flame that 
kindles ours; and the Spirit “which proceedeth 
from the Father” teaches the Father’s children 
that what He would become in them is what in 
His own being He already is. 


II 


In this consciousness, therefore, let us press on 
to consider the practical effects which faith in the 
Holy Spirit ought to bring. By that faith men 


155 


9 ODE YO PE NW ASY'S On Gers 


and women today can believe that through their 
mind and heart and will the reality of God Him- 
self presses through to that new expression of 
Himself in life to which they open the way for 
Him. | 

1. In the first place, then, the Holy Spirit is to 
be the Spirit of goodness. I use that word in a 
wide sense. It is the Spirit which helps us satisfy 
that instinct of excellence which all normal human 
beings feel if they do not deliberately kill it. It is 
the Spirit which helps us to aim higher, to try 
harder, and to measure up more steadily to the 
best we know. 

That means, to begin with, a new heart in the 
common work. A great deal of life is made up 
of drudgery. There are tasks which have got to 
be done simply because necessity requires them. 
Some of the things we do are dull enough, and in 
themselves monotonous and wearisome. If a 
man’s own thought of his work is isolated through 
lack of religion, then the narrow routine of it may 
become intolerable. It is as hateful to his spirit 
as the constant sound of one unvarying note of 
music would become hateful to the ear. Only 
when the one note is put together with other 
notes does it make the symphony, glorious in its 
inspiration; and only when the one thing which 
a man may do is linked by a larger imagination 
with the wide purposes of God in His world does 

156 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


his spirit move out through the small task into the 
ennobling consciousness of the larger whole. That 
is no idle sentiment. It is vital fact. The quaint 
old chronicle of Brother Lawrence can have its 
representations in all times. He was a cook in 
the monastery kitchen, but that did not keep him 
from having the singing heart of religious glad- 
ness. He said he felt God as near to him when 
he was peeling potatoes there in the kitchen as 
he did when he was on his knees before the altar, 
and the reason doubtless was, that, because he 
ennobled his work by doing it so thoroughly and 
well that it might be honorable in God's eyes, his 
work ennobled him. 

In the Book of Exodus there is an account of the 
building of the tabernacle, and it is told there how 
God spoke to Moses about a man named Bezaleel, 
and this is what He said, “I have filled him with 
the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understand- 
ing, and in knowledge, and in all manner of work- 
manship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, 
and in silver, and in brass.” In other words, here 
was a man who was serving God by the skill of his 
hands. In the delicate ingenuity of his craftsman- 
ship, in his ability to take dead timber and metal 
and make them live and grow in beauty, God's 
spirit was at work to make His world a more 
seemly place. Another fine example of the conse- 
cration of a man’s ability in practical things ap- 


157 


5.0 MEY O'R ENWiWiALY S (1.O 1G aap 


pears in Joseph, to whom Pharaoh paid the in- 
stinctive tribute of his question,—“‘Can we find 
such an one as this, a man in whom the Spirit of 
God is?” In the case of Joseph, the Spirit of God 
was to show itself, not in organizing worship and 
in interpreting the moral law like Moses, not even 
in the building of a tabernacle like Bezaleel. It 
was to show itself in practical business Sagacity 
and a knowledge of organization which was to 
conserve the food resources of a nation with com- 
mon sense in the time of plenty, so that in the time 
of need which was coming, there would be enough 
for all. St. Paul wrote to the early Christian dis- 
ciples that they should be fervent in spirit, and 
with that he linked the requirement that they 
should not be slothful in business. He warned the 
Christians in Thessalonica that it was no way to 
show their joy in what they thought was the near 
coming of Jesus by neglecting their daily task. 
They were to go to work in the name of God. 
“Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, 
and to work with your own hands, as we com- 
manded you: that ye may walk honestly toward 
them that are without, and that ye may have lack 
of nothing.” And he added, “Be not weary in 
well doing.” It was no accident that, in a letter 
to these same Christians, he said to them, ‘Quench 
not the Spirit.’ One of the things that they need- 
158 


PEE SEN DWE LULN Ges Pip Ril 


ed the unquenched Spirit for was the grace to be 
glad and faithful in the work of every day. 

Not long ago I was preparing a group of boys 
for Confirmation, and I had wanted to make them 
understand that the main business before them 
was not learning a certain amount of instruction 
from the Bible and Prayer Book, but fastening in 
their minds and hearts the consciousness that they 
were about to devote themselves afresh to Jesus 
Christ, and that, because of that, they must be dif- 
ferent from what they would have been without 
Him. I said to them, ‘“‘What is it going to mean 
to you next week that you should have the Chris- 
tian Spirit?” One boy answered, ‘It means that 
if you strike a hard place in arithmetic you won't 
give it up, but will try to do it right.” One might 
go far to find a sturdier and truer answer. The 
coming of the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ 
will certainly not mean much in the end unless 
it means exactly that in its plain and straight be- 
ginning, namely, the will to grapple with the 
every-day duty in a new sense of responsibility to 
the inner voice of God. 

There is a fine expression of this thought of 
God as the inspiration for the common task in 
the letters of Edward Thring, Headmaster of 
Uppingham School, and one of the pre-eminent 
figures in the educational life of England in the 
nineteenth century. He wrote: 


159 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


‘Now I unhesitatingly assert that my own work 
has succeeded with the many just because God 
gave me a spirit of wisdom to attend to fringes, 
and blue, and purple, and scarlet ribands, and 
Pompeian red, and autotypes, and boys’ studies, 
and the color of curtains to their compartments, 
and a number of little things of this kind. And 
I lay claim to have been great as a schoolmaster 
on this, and on this only, in the main: on having 
had the sense to work with tools, to follow God’s 
guidance in teaching beginners by surrounding 
them, as He did, with noble and worthy sur- 
roundings, taking care that there was no mean- 
ness or neglect; getting rid, as circumstances al- 
lowed, of name-cutting in school, which means 
‘rebellious inattention, combined with mischief and 
vanity,’ or ink-splashing, which means ‘careless 
dirtiness, and contempt for the great thought- 
work’; and all the little vilenesses which drag the 
boy-mind down. It is a slow process, but it is a 
true one; it is not grand, but it is practical: it needs 
patience, but it works by degrees hiaher life. May 
men think of me as one to whom God gave a 
spirit of wisdom to work all manner of work of 
the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and 
of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, and in 
scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even 
of them that do any work, and of those that de- 
vise cunning work. I take my stand on detail.” 


And again he wrote: 
“How strange life is! How little one knows 


what is best! Life is best, the living the day man- 
160 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


fully, truly, and humbly. Not what we plan, but 
how we live. Not what we aim at doing, but how 
we do what we have to do—that is God’s life.” 


Yet the doing of our own individual tasks, of 
course, is not all there is to life. Each man must 
bear his own burden; but it is also true that, 
when each has borne the burden that is his, he 
must help to bear the burden of some other soul 
which staggers under its own. For that sort of 
unselfish burden-bearing, a man needs God. Raw 
human nature carries with it much of its primal 
heritage of unwitting cruelty—a cruelty which 
seeks its own advantage and lets the bruised and 
wounded thing at its side shift as best it may. 
Something more than ordinary instinct is needed 
to lift men above that callous self-concern of the 
human herd. Men will jostle and trample one 
another, partly in fear lest they themselves be 
trampled; until a higher goodness has lifted them 
to a stature in the strength of which they cease to 
be afraid. It is only the souls which have grown 
tall by the grace of God that see life from those 
levels of compassion which make them want to 
stoop to those in need. 

Not very long ago in a great city, a prominent 
and wealthy man was stricken suddenly and died 
in a public place. None of his friends were with 
him, but a stranger who happened to be next him 
helped him all he could. That night those who 

161 


SOME O PEIN IW AY S326 © 3Giorp 


were closest to the man who had died determined 
to try to find the stranger who had been good to 
the one they loved. In some manner they discov- 
ered his name and where he lived. It was an hour 
of tragic and overwhelming sorrow, but one espe- 
cially in that shadowed house was not thinking of 
herself. Out of the agony of grief, her heart 
went out to carry its self-forgetting gratitude. 

She sent a friend, the lawyer of her husband 
who had died, to seek the strange man who had 
been with him. Out beyond the city his directions 
led him, till he came to a lonely section with a few 
desolate houses here and there. He knocked at 
the door of the one which bore the number he was 
looking for. 

A woman opened the door and looked out in 
a frightened and startled way. The visitor asked 
her 1f the man of such and such a name was there. 
“No,” she said, “no, you cannot find him here.” 
“Oh,” he said, “I am very sorry, for he was kind 
to a friend of mine today, and I had come to 
thank him.” The woman’s face changed. ‘Come 
in,” she said. | 

Then she called upstairs, and the man who was 
sought came down. He looked troubled and em- 
barrassed. “You will have to forgive us,’’ he 
said, ‘for what my wife said at the door. The 
truth is that we are about to be turned out of the 
house by the foreclosure of a mortgage. I have 

162 


fella PNeDIWiE I GDN GA SiR 


been downtown all day, trying to get an extension 
of time, and I could not get it. When we heard 
you knock, we thought you were a process-server 
coming to turn us out.” 

His visitor explained the reason why he had 
come. « “You were so good,” he said, ‘‘to the man 
we loved that I have come tonight to thank you.” 
Then suddenly he said, “Have you a lawyer?” 
“No,” said the man, “I would not have any 
money to pay a lawyer.” “Well,” said his visitor, 
“vou have a lawyer now; and if you will come to 
my office tomorrow, I will see that your mortgage 
is paid in the name of the man you helped today.” 

Who was it who knocked that night at the for- 
lorn door? Was it only a human visitor, or was 
it a diviner grace of God? Was it only a hand of 
man, or was it a greater Hand that had been 
scarred? Who was it sent that messenger on 
that errand which ended in a chance for helpful- 
ness so dramatic, yet so unforeseen? Was it only 
a human impulse, or was it the obedience of a 
heart which had become that day the instrument 
of the goodness of God? 

We see the hard texture of our world’s affairs, 
and we do not always see the lovelier things. We 
cannot count, because we do not know, the name- 
less acts of unremembered love. In many an ob- 
scure place where the Holy Spirit moves, there 
is the fragrance of holy deeds as sweet as the 

163 


SOME OPEN. WAYS LO (Gop 


ointment in the alabaster box. ‘He shall receive 
of mine and shall show it unto you,” said Jesus 
of the Holy Spirit. And it is through the moving 
of that Holy Spirit in the hearts of men that the 
grace of Christ does come back to His earth. 


‘‘Loud mockers in the roaring street 
Say Christ is crucified again: 
Twice pierced His gospel-bearing feet 
Twice broken His great heart in vain. 


“I hear, and to myself I smile, 
For Christ talks with me all the while. 


“Poor Lazarus shall wait in Vain, 
And Bartimaeus shall go blind; 
The healing hem shall ne’er again 
Be touched by suffering humankind. 


“Yet all the while I see them rest, 
The poor and outcast, in His breast.” 


We have thought of the things which the Spirit 
of goodness helps us to do—the work that we must 
do each man for himself, and the service that we 
may do each one for others. Yet there is some- 
thing else also for which the Spirit of goodness 
comes. He helps us not only to do but to bear. 

In the last and most beautiful chapter of his 
little book entitled ‘Personal Religion and the 
Life of Devotion,” Dean Inge has written of be- 

164 





Ah aN Ww By PNG Seek 


reavement. Therein he says, “A generation which 
wishes for a religion without tears must find it 
difficult to adjust its beliefs to the teaching of the 
New Testament and to the facts of life.” And 
then Dean Inge goes on to say: 


“T think that those who have had to bear this 
sorrow will agree with me that bereavement is the 
deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, 
an initiation more searching and profound than 
even happy love. Love remembered and conse- 
- crated by grief belongs, more clearly than the 
happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; 
it has proved itself stronger than death. Bereave- 
ment is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; 
if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain 
which it cannot remove. And faith can overcome 
it. It brings the eternal world nearer to us, and 
makes it seem more real. It is not that we look 
forward to anything remotely resembling Eze- 
kiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. Still less 
could we find any comfort from the pathetic illu- 
sions of modern necromancy. These fancies have 
nothing to do with our hope of immortality, which 
would be in no way strengthened by such support. 
Rather does pure affection, so remembered and so 
consecrated, carry us beyond the bourne of time 
and place altogether. It transports us into a 
purer air, where all that has been, is, and will be 
lives together, in its true being, meaning and value 
before the throne of God.” 


Thus in the Christian experience, the Holy 
Spirit, divine messenger of a goodness which God, 


165 


SOME O PEN Ww WiA Ysa Orsi 


sometimes through the furnace of His refining, 
would create, can turn calamity into gain. In His 
presence, as a Christian saint has said, disappoint- 
ment becomes His-appointment. Out of sorrow 
may come the-more valiant spirit, out of duress 
and difficulty the more divinely disciplined soul. 
By no human ingenuity, but by the grace of God, 
working sometimes in strange and shadowed ways, 
the spirits of men find evil turned to good because 
of the goodness which is fashioned through it in 
them. ‘They are more strong to do because they 
have endured, more ready to bear because they 
have been overborne. As George Matheson has 
truly written: 


‘All inward widening is produced by outward 
narrowing. How shall I pass from the life of the 
egotist to the life of the humanitarian? Only 
through my own strait gate. The wing by which 
I fly to your trouble is the wing which is wounded; 
the hand by which I help you is the hand which is 
maimed. In vain shall I enter your desert till I 
have tasted the waters of Marah. Not by fear- 
less running shall I overtake and lift your burden, 
but by halting on my own thigh. The education 
in sympathy is the experience of personal bruises; 
of every true comforter we can say, ‘By his stripes 
we are healed.’ ” 


2. In the second place, the Holy Spirit is the 
Spirit of truth. It was by that name that Jesus 
166 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


called Him. ‘When he, the Spirit of truth, 1s 
come, he will guide you into all truth.” 

The first conclusion which needs to be drawn 
from those words of Jesus is that the Spirit of 
truth is likely to lead on unexpected ways. That 
is exactly what had happened in His own life. 
The Pharisees and Scribes had builded a fence of 
definitions in which their minds complacently 
dwelt. They had made God’s reality synonymous 
with their own traditions. Anyone who went out- 
side the wall of their permissive thinking was to 
them a heretic and a traitor to the citadel of an- 
cient faith; but Jesus did go out on the bold, free 
paths of His conquest for the larger Kingdom of 
God. He went out to the common folk, of whom 
the Pharisees said, “This multitude that knoweth 
not the law are accursed.” He went out to the 
sinners and to the socially disreputable. He went 
to carry the spirit of religion into wide human con- 
tacts which shocked the Pharisees’ ideas of ecclesi- 
astical convention. He left their hampering code 
of ritual and artificial piety behind Him, and He 
taught that the truth of God’s meaning for human 
lives is a far simpler and more flexible thing than 
the iron-bound catechisms of thought and action 
into which the ecclesiastics of His time had tried 
to shut it. 

When, therefore, Jesus said that the Spirit of 
truth would lead men into all truth, when He said 

167 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


further that the Spirit “shall take of mine and 
shew it unto you,’ He meant that the Spirit of 
truth, working in the lives of His disciples, would 
lead men forth into unpredictable adventures in 
religious thinking and religious practice. His dis- 
ciples should need to be open-minded to follow the 
ways of that Spirit out beyond the walls of old 
precedent in newness of imagination. The thing 
which made Paul the most flaming influence among 
the early disciples was that his swift instinct 
understood this meaning of his Master. In his 
day, the mental attitude of the men who formed 
the early Christian Church had not changed much 
from that of Judaism itself. They clung to the 
teaching of the law and the regulations of the 
Scribes. ‘They still identified religion with the old 
pious conventions and with all sorts of trivial re- 
quirements which were made authoritative simply 
because people assumed that they always had been 
so. Their minds were shocked at the idea that 
Gentiles should be admitted to the Christian 
Church—that is to say, that anyone should be ad- 
mitted who did not speak the ecclesiastical lan- 
guage, conform to all the ancient definitions, and 
generally act in exactly the same fashion in which 
they had always supposed that proper religious 
people would act. When Paul started forth on his 
mission to the Gentiles, when he said in effect that 
a great deal with which the Church was concerned 
168 


THE EN DWELELIN GOS PURET 


had no vital relation to religion at all, and that 
the business of an Apostle was not to make people 
bow down before the idol of a supposed ortho- 
doxy, which had been made up in part out of a 
knowledge of God, and in a greater part out of 
the stubborn accumulation of human habit and 
prejudice, but to bid them rise up as sons of God 
who found their new freedom in the living com- 
pulsion of Christ—when Paul did that, in spite of 
the dismay of timid Christians, he led Christianity 
forth into its wide possibilities of intellectual and 
spiritual conquest. 

The same thing was true at the time of the Re- 
formation. Men arose whom the established 
hierarchies called heretics and rebels against au- 
thority. When they protested against most obvi- 
ous iniquities of the Church, their superiors at- 
tempted to silence them; and when, made bold by 
necessity, they went forward to proclaim forgotten 
spiritual truths—to assert the priesthood of all be- 
lievers, the right of access for every soul to the 
Scriptures, and that most courageous doctrine of 
all for those times, that a man should be justified, 
not by any works of his own, nor by any mechanical 
merits of the Church, but through the immediate 
relationship into which Christ had entered with his 
own soul—still the established forces of the 
Church fought as bitterly as they could against 
them. Those things which we receive from .the 


169 


2 OM EO PRN IW.VACY'S lO 1G aa 


Reformation today as our most unquestioned heri- 
tage, those great conceptions of the liberty of the 
spirit, came to us through the courage of those 
who dared to be called heretics in their day, in 
order that they- might be vindicated as the pro- 
phets of a nobler orthodoxy for tomorrow. 
Always the peril of religious loyalty has been 
that it fails to keep the open mind. Standing 
guard over the things which have been, it may fail 
to understand or welcome those things which God 
means to bring to be; and so the Church has often 
bitterly resisted that which afterwards it was 
forced to recognize as true. The Inquisition con- 
demned Galileo and declared his teaching blas- 
phemous when he asserted that the earth was not 
the centre of the universe. Theological teachers 
without number set up an antithesis between the 
teaching of evolution and the teachings of Chris- 
tianity, even as a remnant do today, and by the 
dilemma which they were determined to maintain, 
drove out of the Church many people who would 
not sacrifice their intellectual conscience, and who 
yet were told that, if they followed it, they should 
have no place in the Christian fellowship. The so- 
called fundamentalists in some Christian com- 
munions continue to denounce all “higher criti- 
cism’”’ of the Bible, and insist that the Old and 
New Testaments must be accepted throughout as 
the infallible and inerrant Word of God, lest the 
170 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


whole fabric of faith disintegrate; and tradition- 
alists in such a body as the Episcopal Church set 
up the same rigidity of dogma as do their funda- 
mentalist brothers, the only difference being that 
they take the literal clauses of the Apostles’ and 
Nicene Creeds and by fixity of interpretation make 
these into the confining walls for thought which 
the fundamentalist rather more logically builds 
out of his doctrine of the infallible scriptures. 
Meanwhile, if either group had its way the 
thought of the Church would be effectively cor- 
ralled within the fences which the orthodox of the 
particular period deem to be “safe.” 

_ But in the face of the long, and sometimes the 
humiliating lessons of the centuries, those who 
are the leaders of the Church should learn the 
spirit of humility and of that reverent open-mind- 
edness which is quick to apprehend the possibility 
of a truth beyond that which they have already 
known. ‘Truth itself is so great and vital, and 
the changes in men’s apprehension are so swift, 
that, though none should be disloyal to their own 
convictions, none can afford to be dogmatic against 
what some searcher of the future may cry from 
his hill-top that he sees beyond. As Bishop Law- 
rence reminds us in his Fifty Years, the famous 
volume of Essays and Reviews, published in 
England in 1861, brought to the Church of that 
generation the message of the modern historical 


171 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


study of the Bible, and so outraged was the Bishop 
of Oxford, at that time the most eloquent leader 
of the Church of England, that he solemnly de- 
manded that all the essayists be compelled to 
withdraw from the Ministry. Yet the essential 
message of Essays and Reviews, so startling and 
unexpected then, has become the commonplace of 
reverent scholarship today, and Frederick Temple, 
who wrote the first of them, and whose deposition 
the Bishop of Oxford demanded, lived himself to 
become the Archbishop of Canterbury, and head 
thus of the Established Church. To those who, 
in the face of all the lessons of the past, stand 
still in the stubbornness which imagines every 
opinion to be the very ark of God, the words 
which Oliver Cromwell once spoke to the Kirk 
have not lost their meaning: “I beseech you by 
the mercies of Christ that you imagine it possible 
that you may be mistaken!” 

The reason why many earnest folk within the 
Church are always frightened at suggested 
changes in men’s conception of the truth, or at 
any recasting of the old phrases in which that 
truth has been familiarly expressed, is because they 
have a shrunken conception of what truth is. They 
treat it nervously as though it were an invalid. 
They would shut it up inside the room of their 
pious solicitude, where no draughts from any win- 
dow open to the wide world’s questionings might 

172 


hk eI NDWELLING SPOR TT 


blow upon it, lest it catch a spiritual chill and die. 
They enfeeble their own belief by this exaggerated 
nervousness to such an extent that that which 
passes for truth in their own consciousness does 
become an anemic, tottering thing. But they need 
to listen to the stalwart words of old John Milton: 
“IT cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out 
and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race 
where the immortal garland is to be run for, not 
without dust and heat.” The real Spirit of truth 
is not served by those who would make it clois- 
tered and fugitive. On the contrary, it must go 
out open-eyed ready for encounter; and they who 
follow truth will behold it thus marching on to 
seize more spacious fields of life, in its ever more 
nobly interpreted consciousness of God. 

Furthermore, as the Spirit of truth requires 
open-mindedness, so also it requires ready-witted 
adaptation of our energies to meet new situa- 
tions as they arise. 

The trouble with the would-be defenders of the 
faith usually is that they defend the wrong posi- 
tion. They fight desperately in some quarter of 
the battle-field which has long ceased to be strate- 
gic. With a tremendous show of flags and argu- 
mentative array of guns, they hold the trenches 
in some sector from which the main attack has 
completely shifted. 


173 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO "Gow 


Jesus said that the children of this generation 
are wiser than the children of light, and it is cer- 
tainly true that men in their practical necessities 
very often show more common-sense than they do 
in their religion. If the French General Staff had 
been as hopelessly unimaginative in their way of 
waging war as many religious leaders are in their 
way of waging theirs, the German army would 
have crushed France at its pleasure. To multi- 
tudes of people who read each morning the war 
bulletins with a breathless tension of anxiety 
through those days of August and early Septem- 
ber in 1914, it seemed clear that the effective de- 
fence of France must rest upon certain great bor- 
der fortresses. These were supposed to be the bul- 
warks of her resistance. If they failed, her cause 
might be hopelessly imperilled. But before the 
actual necessities of the hour, the French leaders 
were following a different conception. Past one 
by one of the fortresses of the North, past Mau- 
berge and Lille, and other points hitherto consid- 
ered vital to the defence of Paris, the French 
army was withdrawn. If any considerable part 
of the army had been held within the forts which 
the unprecedented German artillery had proved 
its power to smash in pieces, the strength of 
France would have been divided and consumed 
little by little until defeat was sure. Instead, the 
army had to take the open field. It had to learn 


174 


eee ND Web TyTN Gol Sa kb E 


an elastic adaptation to considerations of warfare 
unheard of in old traditions. It had to learn to 
dig its trenches where the exigencies of the day 
demanded and to concentrate its power where the 
changing shock of battle moved. And even past 
Paris it was ready to withdraw, should defence of 
the capital itself seem impracticable. Writes John 
Buchan in his History of the Great War, ‘With 
incomparable courage and patience, and with the 
mental elasticity of his race, Joffre faced the crisis, 
jettisoned his cherished preconceptions, and pre- 
pared a new plan on the new facts now at last 
made plain. When he was ordered to detach three 
army-corps for the defence of Paris, he acquiesced 
but reserved his opinion. He... was resolved 
to resist most stoutly the lure of fortified places 
and keep his army together as a force of man- 
oeuvre.” Because her leaders did thus in the 
beginning, and through the years of struggle, use 
the armies with alert imagination, France was 
at last victorious. 

But those who take up the defence of Christian 
belief in the field of religious discussion are usual- 
ly not as wise as that. They insist upon believing 
that the old positions are forever vital. They 
argue vehemently for the exact phraseology and 
the traditional interpretation of the historic 
creeds. They insist that the whole citadel of 
Christian faith is abandoned if those particular 


175 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


arguments concerning miracles or the infallibility 
of the New Testament, or the authority of the 
Church, which were the key-points in yesterday’s 
discussion, should for a moment cease to be main- 
tained. But thé real matter at issue involves a 
far more deadly and immediate peril. What 
would it avail if a little group of devoted and 
immovable Christian scribes should hold to their 
immovable ideas, and even make for these theo- 
retically a highly successful defence, if meanwhile 
the real tide of battle had rolled round the flanks 
of these border positions and struck deep into a 
far more vital region upon which all their com- 
munications depend? The attack upon Christian 
faith which the scepticism of our time is making 
does not sit down to lay siege to particular doc. 
trines concerning this or that miracle. It assails 
the basic conceptions of God, and of Spirit in the 
universe. What the forces of Christian intelli- 
gence and devotion must do is to meet the shock 
of denial on that ground where actually it comes. 
They must stop wasting their time and dividing 
their strength in matters which for the moment 
are wholly secondary; but first must prove to the 
mind of this age, with its rebellious disregard of 
traditional arguments, the reality of God in this 
present world and the actual presence and necessity 
of Christ in the affairs of men. 

Not long ago a mother came to me to tell me 


176 


TELE STUN DWELLING SEER EL 


of her problem in the attitude of her son just 
grown to manhood. He had flung down his chal- 
lenge quite frankly and defiantly in the face of the 
most elemental conceptions of morality and re- 
ligion. He waved his mother’s scruples aside with 
the complete assent of the other members of his 
college group. Her ideas of morality, he said, 
were nothing but Puritan inhibitions. He pro- 
posed to live his own life in his own way. He 
could not sincerely believe that she really liked 
to go to Church. She had too much intelligence, 
he said, to pretend in these times to believe in 
God. 

Can that sort of challenge to religion be 
met by quoting proof texts in support, for ex- 
ample, of the miraculous birth of Christ? Can it 
be met by insisting that the Greek philosophy of 
the early Church fathers was invariably right, and 
that somehow the precise phraseology of the Ni- 
cene Creed is a cure for all spiritual difficulties? 
Ecclesiastics may come together, far removed 
from the actual impact of the mind of this gen- 
eration, and with much solemn nodding of the 
heads and indignant adjuring of one another 
against altering the methods of yesterday, send out 
their staff commands to stake the power of Chris- 
tian faith upon the holding of the old position; 
but men who feel the immediate nature of the 
actual task, and feel their minds and sprits kindle 


177 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


with the challenge of an effective warfare, know 
that Christianity must first of all concentrate its 
forces to answer and persuade the modern denial 
of religion at those points where it is visibly in the 
field. It will take the full force of a united Church, 
illumined by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, to do 
that. It will take the power of a glowing Chris- 
tianity, undistracted by divisions among its own 
teachers, to make plain first of all that life needs 
God, and that there are ways for men manifestly to 
find God, and that, without the grace of God which 
Christ incarnated, our world will go to chaos and 
confusion. And when this is said, it does not 
mean that all the older aspects of Christian theol- 
ogy which traditionalists would seek to hold have 
no ultimate meaning. It no more means that these 
must be considered as carelessly abandoned than 
France considered Mauberge and Lille to be aban- 
doned because for the time her warfare had 
shifted to other ground. It was on the Marne 
and on the Aisne and in the long struggle of the 
trenches that victory had to be fought for, in 
order that at length all the provinces might be 
regained. In exactly the same manner, if the Holy 
Spirit of wisdom comes into the Church today, 
it will come to teach it that the warfare of the 
Christian intellect must be concentrated now on 
very vital and simple matters if the victorious 
178 


le es ee 


PeiberlNiDWiR LEN Gis PUREE 


flags at last are to be planted over the wide spaces 
which are precious to ancient faith. 

But the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth has 
another contribution to make in addition to the 
ones we have indicated. It does not only teach 
the way in which Christian truth can be defended 
against denial. That would leave the Christian 
witness a passive, half-hearted thing. It brings 
also the positive awareness by which the mind 
goes forward to new apprehension of the truth 
of Christ for today and for tomorrow. 

The tragic contradiction of the facts which led 
to the crucifixion of Jesus lay in the blind incapa- 
city of men to understand the reality which they 
confronted. Leaders of the Church in Jesus’ day, 
men who said their prayers and went every Sab- 
bath to worship, and all the lesser crowd who 
followed the spokesmen of the Church, clamored 
for Jesus’ crucifixion, not because He was the 
Savior, but because they stubbornly convinced 
themselves that He was no Savior at all. They 
were looking for a Messiah from God, but He did 
not square with their preconceptions. They 
wanted a deliverer with prestige and power, 
crowned and sceptred, with armies at his back. 
When this man out of the provinces, making His 
friends among the common people, and having 
no other title to authority except that curious hold 
which He had on men’s souls to make them ad- 


179 


SOME OREN WAYS TO (GOD 


venture recklessly for the Kingdom of God, spoke 
of Himself as being the Son of the Most High, 
they thought it was little short of blasphemy. To 
let Him live would be to deny their hope of a reve- 
lation from God which would convince the rich 
and powerful and all the people generally who 
think they count for most in this world. So they 
put Him to death in fierce good conscience. That 
is what the world will do today unless the Holy 
Spirit makes men wise. Christ may come again 
in humble guise. He comes in the aspirations of 
working men. He comes in the deep rebellion of 
the toiling masses against the idleness of parasites 
and the cruelty of irresponsible wealth. He comes 
to cast down the mighty from their seats and to 
exalt the humble and meek. He comes in the 
often inarticulate yet unquenchable hope of the 
common man to find a way to deliver this world 
from the abominable snatchings and plunderings 
of militarists and of so-called patriot statesmen 
who keep up the old round of war, and to build 
it instead into the brotherhood of a decent peace. 
He comes through those disturbing ideals which 
men who like this world as it is, because they fat- 
ten on its iniquities, hate and denounce as dan- 
gerous disturbances. He comes, just as He came 
in Palestine, with that amazing challenge of the 
Kingdom of God which makes hard-headed people 
who call themselves practical, both without the 
180 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


Church and within it, fly into a passion. The 
power of God for the world’s redemption, that 
silent, tremendous power which ignores the out- 
ward appearances and lays hold of the inner 
springs of life and character, came to the world, 
and people who had plenty of shrewdness, but no 
inspiration, could not see it. They had no recog- 
nition of what He really was; and the question 1s 
whether there is much more recognition of Him 
now. ‘When the Son of man comes, shall he find 
faith on the earth?” asked Jesus. In this present 
civilization of ours, He may come in surprising 
influences and from surprising quarters, and the 
Church will need very acutely the guidance of the 
Holy Spirit if it is not to be so obsessed with its 
own notions and with the conventions and com- 
placencies of respectable and satisfied people, that 
it should fail to recognize and espouse the dis- 
turbing and difficult reformation which Christ 
may come to bring. 

3. In the third place, the Holy Spirit may come 
as the Spirit of power. ‘There is a fine expression 
of what this means in the third of the essays, 
edited by B. H. Streeter and published a few years 
ago under the title, The Spirit: The Relation of 
God and Man, considered from the Standpoint of 
Recent Philosophy and Science. In that volume 
a physician, Captain J. Arthur Hadfield, writes 
as follows: 

181 


SO ME CORE Ne Wass) 1:07 GOie 


‘While it has not been the purpose of this Essay 
to deal with questions of theology, I cannot help 
pointing out that our discussion of the psychology 
of power has a very direct bearing on the question 
of the dynamic of religion, and especially on the 
power possessed by the Christian religion of liber- 
ating energies which can transform the living soul 
into a quickening spirit. In its fundamental doc- 
trine of love of God and man, Christianity har- 
monises the emotion of the soul into one inspiring 
purpose, thereby abolishing all conflict, and liber- 
ating instead of suppressing the free energies of 
men. In its doctrine of the Spirit it emphasizes 
the element of power in religion. No reader of 
the New Testament can fail to be struck by the 
constant reiteration in different forms of the idea 
that the normal experience of a Christian at that 
epoch was enhancement of power—'‘I can do all 
things’—an enhancement attributed by them to the 
operation in and through them of a divine energy 
to which the community gave the name of the 
‘Spirit—‘Ye shall receive power.’ Pentecost, the 
healing miracles of the Apostolic Age, the tri- 
umphant progress of the religion through the Ro- 
man Empire, the heroic deeds of saints and 
martyrs,—all these point to the sense of a power 
newly discovered. In contrast, looking at the 
Church of today, one cannot but be struck with 
its powerlessness. It contains men of intellect; 
it produces a type of piety and devotion which 
one cannot but admire; it sacrifices itself in works 
of kindness and beneficence; but even its best 
friends would not claim that it inspires in the 
world the sense of power. What strikes one 
rather is its impotence and failure. This want of 

182 


THE INDWELLING SPIRIT 


inspiration and power is associated with the fact 
that men no longer believe in the existence of the 
Spirit in any effective practical way. They believe 
in God the Father, and they are reverent; they 
believe in the Son, and the Church numbers among 
its members millions who humbly try to ‘follow 
in His steps’; but for all practical purposes they 
are like that little band at Ephesus who had ‘not 
so much as heard whether there be any Holy 
Ghost,’ and, lacking the inspiration of such a be- 
lief, they are weak and wonder why.” 


That is a statement which would be depressing 
in its description of the present if it were not so 
full of the better promise for the possible future. 
To the Church of today and tomorrow, and to 
the men and women in it, the Holy Spirit can 
come with fulness of power. Of that I shall not 
speak at length now, but shall save that rather for 
the chapter which is to follow on the Church, 
since it is, 1 believe, through the Church and 
through the inspiration of its fellowship, rather 
than to lives in isolation, that the Spirit of power 
will most truly come. But at this point we can 
plant at least the banner of our confidence that it 
does come. Into lives which by themselves are 
without beauty and without potency, the Holy 
Spirit can enter like the tide flooding into the bay, 
to deepen all the channels and to set the ships of 
stranded energies free for the far ocean ways. 


183 


CHAPTER V 
WHY BELONG TO THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH? 


WHEN we set down on a printed page the word 
“Church,” there it stands with exactly the same 
appearance for every eye that falls upon it; but 
out of those six letters, there will be read as many 
different meanings as there are minds to frame 
them. Let one speak of the Church as clearly as 
he may, yet he has by no means framed a limited 
little package of significance which every person 
to whom he would wish to convey it shall receive 
alike. On the contrary, he has, as it were, touched 
an electric button which will set in motion the in- 
finitely different machinery of the associations 
which in the thoughts of different people are con- 
nected with that surcharged word. Say that word 
“Church,” and in the minds of some will rise im- 
mediately a picture of some dearly familiar place 
—a slender white spire rising over the elms of a 
New England village, a plain building at the coun- 
try cross-roads with the country folk driving up 
the roads on Sunday; some spacious thing of stone, 
with glorious stained glass, built in the midst of 
a great city; a Cathedral, lifting its ancient towers 
over some grey town of the older world. Say 
that same word and in one mind there will rise 
the thought of worship framed in a rich liturgy 

184 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


with music, vestments, and colors; and in the 
thought of another will rise a picture of some 
plain meeting-house where worship is conducted 
with Quaker-like austerity. Or the word 
“Church” may suggest machinery of ecclesiastical 
administration, boards and conferences and coun- 
cils; and to some it will suggest the clamor of 
theological discussions rising from a miscellany of 
competing groups more intent upon exaggerating 
their differences than upon finding an understand- 
ing which might bind them together. So when 
today one broaches the question as to what one 
ought to believe about the Church and what one 
may rightly feel toward it, one is immediately 
confronted by this confusion as to the thing with 
which the belief or the feeling is supposed to have 
to do. What is the Church, and where shall we 
find a common denominator by which we may 
bring men’s multitudinous ideas to one clear basis 
of relation? 

To answer that, we need to look up along the 
branching rivers of the many different meanings 
toward their far unity in the hills. What impulse 
did all the many loyalties which call themselves 
by the name of the Church flow from in the first 
place? What is the creative and continuing 
source without which there would not be anything 
to be called the Church? 

185 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


I 


1. To that question, at least, Christians of all 
names and kinds can answer in essentially the 
same way. ‘They-would say that the Church is 
due to Jesus. It is meant to be the embodiment 
and the expression of His purpose in and for the 
world. However much the various groups of 
Christians might emphasize the marks which 
they consider essential to the properly developed 
Church of today, all of them would admit that 
the Church in its beginning was a very much 
simpler matter than the forms in which it is now 
known. Some of the Church buildings in coun- 
tries where Christianity first came into being are 
immensely ancient. But the Church existed before 
those most ancient buildings were ever set up. In 
the liturgies of the historic communions there are 
creeds and prayers which have been used for cen- 
turies; but the Church existed long before there 
were any liturgical forms. There has been deter- 
mined controversy concerning the proper form of 
Church government, and back in earliest Chris- 
tian literature are traces of the origins of pres- 
byters and of bishops and of the organized struc- 
ture which since has gathered round those names. 
But the Church existed before there was any 

186 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


scheme of government whatever. The Church 
began with a fellowship, intimate, personal, vital- 
ly related to one central fact. The Church began 
when Jesus gathered round Himself the little 
eroup of men to whom He was to communicate 
His Spirit, and out of whom He was to fashion 
the builders of His spiritual kingdom. When 
Jesus walked on the ways of Galilee, when He 
went out into the wilderness to pray, when He 
taught and preached and lived every day His 
visible message of the love of God, with James 
and John and Andrew and Peter and the rest of 
His friends around Him, there already the Chris- 
tian Church, the Ecclesia, the little fellowship who 
had been called out of the common life to be salt 
and leaven and seed for the future harvest, 
existed on earth in its essential spiritual fact. 
Whatever else might come afterwards could only 
enrich and confirm the reality which was already 
there. Sacraments might be needed later to con- 
vey effectively to men’s hearts that sense of the 
grace of Jesus which the disciples in their per- 
sonal contact instinctively felt in Him. Forms 
of ecclesiastical government would arise to admin- 
ister the affairs of the Christian community. But 
all these things could find their value only with re- 
lation to that first experience which they must 
hand down like fire through the torches of suc- 
187 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


ceeding generations, namely,—the kindling emo- 
tion of lives directly lighted from the thought and 
will of Jesus. Wherever in any place or time 
there is a human fellowship which is finding God 
through Jesus, and, weaving the bond of a com- 
mon life in Him, there is the Church, and all 
church buildings, whether they be the log hut of 
the simplest mission or the mightiest cathedral 
towering to the sky, all forms of worship, whether 
of simplicity or grandeur, all forms of church gov- 
ernment, whether the simplest democracy of the 
congregation or the august authority of the popes 
of Rome, will ultimately be judged and valued 
not by any argumentative and theoretical consid- 
erations, but only by the living fact of whether or 
not they do keep men close to that which is for- 
ever the only heart of the living Church, namely, 
the life of Jeus communicating itself in mind and 
deed through His disciples. 

2. I wish to dwell upon this conception of the 
Church with a very earnest emphasis, for I think 
it cleanses us from much false pride and brings 
us into the glow of a central truth before whose 
touch many little barriers of our stubborn preju- 
dices go down. We cannot ignore, of course, the 
conditions in the midst of which we actually find 
ourselves today. The Christian Church is not 
visibly one, but is divided into many distinct and 

188 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


sometimes very determined differences. Inevitably 
the men and women who have been reared in some 
particular form of Christian organization and 
with a form of Church worship and of govern- 
ment which long custom, both of thought and of 
practice, makes them regard as normal, and there- 
fore best, will want to preserve the values which 
they think are precious to Christian experience. 
I feel that way about the Church to which I be- 
long. I could not feel at home in any other com- 
munion which lacked the riches which it seems to 
me she holds in trust—her inheritance of liberty, 
yet of continuity too—her tradition of English 
freedom, yet of that sturdy reverence for tradi- 
tion which makes the life of today reach back 
into the deep, rich soil of the experience of many 
generations—her beauty of worship—her mystic 
consciousness of the Church itself as no mere so- 
ciety created casually by any group of human in- 
dividuals, but as the body of the faithful to whom 
the Lord Himself has promised to convey His 
sacramental grace—all this it means to me. Yet 
when I look back and see the infinite simplicity 
of my Master, I know that nothing counts either 
for the Church which I may love or for the 
Church which any other man may love except in 
so far as it makes Him manifest. I am not so 
vain as to imagine that anything which either I or 
189 


5» O-MLE? O PAN GOW AY Sir TtO Grae 


the Church itself, in its most authoritative pro- 
nouncements, can imagine to confer honor upon ~ 
the Lord, can really honor Him if in the result 
His spirit is hidden from the eyes of simple men. 
Looking at Him, I am quite sure that the Church 
is most likely to justify all the grandeur of its 
own conception of its mission in exactly the meas- 
ure in which it thinks least of this and most of 
Him. Whenever any part of the Church exalts 
its supposed prerogatives, it falls into the ancient 
mistake of the Pharisees and crucifies the actual 
Christ. I am sure that for any Church to prove 
that it has the apostolic succession the best way is 
to demonstrate that it has the apostolic success. 
If any Church manifestly does succeed as the 
Apostles did in casting the devils out of men’s 
hearts and putting the Spirit of Jesus there in- 
stead, then all theoretical arguments pro and con 
will be nothing but empty chatter in the face of 
the fact that the real succession of apostolic grace 
does evidently flow into that Church from the 
Apostles’ Lord. And when all the various 
branches of the Christian Church do demand of 
themselves and encourage in one another the au- 
thoritative simplicity of what the Church first of 
all is meant to be, the living creation of a fellow- 
ship between the heart of Jesus and the hearts of 
men, then one day the divided Churches may dis- 
190 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


cover that they have arrived at an inner unity 
which will enable all external differences to be 
dealt with in the adjustment of love. 


II 


But at this point, no doubt the man outside the 
Church will say: ‘That is all very well as a fine 
ideal. If the Church were like that, I might be 
interested in it; but it is not like that. It does 
not really concentrate on the simplicities of Jesus. 
It does not really come together on the important 
things. It is made up of a lot of competing sects 
filled with people who are not conspicuously better 
than their neighbors. However I might be drawn 
to the Church as it conceivably could be but is not, 
I am not drawn to the actual fact which I am 
offered.” 

That is what the man outside the Church may 
say in general. Sometimes his objections are still 
more explicit. It is well for us to take them up 
definitely and see what may be said in answer to 
them. 

1. In the first place, it is often alleged that the 
Church is not worth entering because it has so 
many unattractive people init. “Its company does 
not win me,” says the man outside. So he stays 
contentedly where he is. 

Now it must be confessed that the Church does 


IgI 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


have unattractive people in it, and a lamentable 
plenty of them. To begin with, the ministers. 
They may be as unattractive sometimes as the 
worst enemy of the Church could desire. There 
are occasions when, instead of believing in God 
through His ecclesiastical representative, the 
would-be disciple must shut his eyes to the gloomy 
discouragement which some minister whom he 
knows presents and deliberately climb over him, 
or go round him, as an obstacle in the path that 
leads to God. Said Jowett of Balliol to Margot 
Asquith, “Margot, you must believe in God, in 
spite of what the clergy say.” Some preachers 
make religion seem like a dismal penance instead 
of wings to lift the soul. They look as though 
they were the “original somebody who is always 
taking the joy out of life,” and sometimes, which 
is almost worse, they make religion appear to be 
a perfunctory routine. It was of such that David 
Garrick was doubtless thinking when he is reported 
to have said, as he mused indignantly once on a 
certain preacher, ‘In my profession I take ficti- 
tious things and make them appear real, and he 
takes real things and makes them appear ficti- 
tious.”’ All this is a bad handicap for the Church 
to carry. Every dour minister is a forbidding ad- 
vertisement for the whole ecclesiastical climate, 
and the man outside, who moves in his irrespon- 
192 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


sible but on the whole cheerful world, decides that 
he will stay where he is. 

Nor is the trouble confined to the clergy. Some- 
body once asked a great preacher, who himself 
in his gay and brilliant enthusiasm of service was 
the type of all that the ministry ideally should 
be, ‘‘Why is it that ministers in general are not 
better than they are?’ And his quick answer 
was, ‘Because we have nothing but the laity to 
draw from.” It is the laity who furnish the min- 
istry. It is the laity who sometimes are account- 
able for the shortcomings of those who are try- 
ing to minister to that same very refractory lay 
flock. There was an old colored preacher once 
who made the following announcement to his con- 
gregation: ‘‘Bredren, I hear dere’s been some 
complaint about de longness of de sermon, and 
I’s got a complaint to make. It’s about de small- 
ness of de. collection. Hereafter de collection is 
ewine to be took up before de sermon, and the 
smaller de collection, de longer de sermon.” The 
tedium of the preaching in other churches than 
the colored one may often be due to the dulness 
of the congregation. If the people responded in 
a livelier fashion to the preacher’s efforts, he 
would have a livelier spirit to carry into next day’s 
work; but the trouble with our Christianity in the 
pews, and among the people who go out from the 
pews to create the atmosphere in the everyday 


193 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


places, is that so often there is no joy of holiness 
about them. They are conscientious and honest, 
but somehow the Spirit has never touched their 
religion into flame. A great deal of the knowl- 
edge that people acquire in Churches seems to lie 
in their minds as a dusty theory rather than ever 
to come as a fire to the heart. “Chere was uncon- 
scious but most sure judgment in the wonder of 
a little girl who lay in a hospital one Easter-day 
and said to her nurse as she entered the room, 
“Did you know that this was Easter morning?” 
“Yes,”? said the nurse. ‘But did you know that 
this was the day on which Jesus rose again?” the 
little girl persisted. ‘‘Yes,” said the nurse a little 
impatiently. ‘“‘Why did you think I didn’t know?” 
“But how could you know,” said the child, “and 
look so dull?” 

That is what the unconvinced world often says 
as it looks upon the Church. How can it be in 
possession of any truth which has a thrilling mes- 
sage when the lives of so many members are un- 
inspired and dull? Is there anything in the Church 
to make it lastingly more congenial than the com- 
pany which is outside? 

Yes. Thereis. Not, it is true, to the man who 
has no moral earnestness in him and is only trying 
to find a flippant excuse for plausible indifference. 
Not to the man who has no desire for excellence. 
Not to the idler and the wastrel. But to the 


194 


Wily SBELONG LO! THE» CHURCH? 


thoughtful man who loves the best and believes in 
it and wants to find it, the Church does have con- 
genial company. In spite of its exceptions, in 
spite of its unpleasant temperaments, it does fur- 
nish a fellowship where clean joys and sound 
friendships and wholesome living are at a pre- 
mium. In the long run it does show life, not in its 
least, but in its most attractive aspect. 

Begin with the ministry. It is perfectly possible 
for a man to come into contact with some indi- 
vidual minister whose acid theology and stiff un- 
humanness disgust him with the whole idea of 
ecclesiastical leadership; but any man who holds 
one example of this kind as a sort of obsession 
before his thought is simply blinding himself to 
truth. When he lifts his eyes and sees the long 
perspective of the Church’s history, he sees it 
crowded with the glorious figures of those who 
have been the priests and prophets of God. There 
is no nobler fellowship than that of those who 
through the ages have been the spokesmen of the 
Christian Church, and the peoples of Western 
Europe were leavened with those ideals out of 
which their civilization came by such heroic mes- 
sengers as Columba, and Boniface, and Anskar, 
and Augustine. The whole level of human 
thought and aspiration was lifted by the creative 
spiritual power of such intrepid prophets of the 
truth as John Huss and Savonarola, Calvin and 


195 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


John Knox, George Whitefield and John Wes- 
ley. With all the shortcomings of many of its 
representatives admitted, nevertheless the Chris- 
tian Church can measure its ministry against any 
other rank of men who have played creative parts 
in the building of our society and have reason for 
honor in that comparison. In many climactic mo- 
ments of human affairs it has been true, as Charles 
Silvester Horne eloquently wrote in his Romance 
of Preaching, of the ambassador of the Church, 
“When he takes the stage, all other actors are 
dwarfed. If he is not there, time itself seems to 
wait for his appearance. Prince and priest alike 
are insignificant in his majestic presence. Both 
his words and deeds are memorable. His inter- 
ventions, his appearances, mark the crises of his- 
tory.” In one of the tragic hours of the subjection 
of Belgium, on January 31, 1917, Cardinal Mer- 
cier wrote to the German Governor General: 
“There is a barrier before which military force is 
held up and behind which is entrenched inviolate 
right. On this side of the barrier it is we, the 
representatives of moral authority, who speak as 
masters. We cannot and will not let the word of 
God be shackled.” Because of the work in this 
our world of that Christian brotherhood, greater 
than any one communion, which at that time Car- 
dinal Mercier represented, the spiritual dignity of 
196 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


mankind does move out in every generation into 
an unshackled and more spacious freedom. 

Words like those are, of course, not always 
applicable. The average man does not rise to the 
level of the great. Else there would be no dif- 
ference in greatness. ‘The ordinary minister of 
the Christian Church, the ordinary priest, carry- 
ing on his humble responsibilities at some small 
post of routine duty, may not captivate the imag- 
ination; but the thoughtful man would admit that 
every community is better for the presence in it 
of a group of Christian leaders who by the high 
expectation of their office must hold themselves 
accountable, and try to win their people, to ideals 
of honor, of truth, and of unselfishness, and to a 
recognition of those unseen and spiritual values 
which are more important than any material gain. 
In the fine words of Van Vogt in his 4rt and Re- 
ligion: 


‘‘A dmonition and exhortation, comfort, the reso- 
lution of doubt, the healing of the inly blind, these 
all are the uses of a good priest and true. He ts 
friend and fatherly confessor, counselor, guide, 
and man of God, bringing near the fresh peace 
and joy of the timeless and eternal world. He 
invites the strong to bear the infirmities of the 
weak, and in his church provides them a definite 
and ever ready medium for that ministry, varied, 
adaptable, and permanent. He carries to lonely, 
sick, and sorrowing persons the assurances of the 


197 


S'O.M'ti) ORIEN, WrA YS Oa G ae 


faith, assurances, . . . more than doubly strong 
because not merely his own and personal but rather 
of his office, representing the strong body of be- 
lievers and loyal workers behind him and around 
him in the church, whose servant he is, of whose 
word and faith he is but the mouthpiece: assur- 
ances received also because conveyed by one set 
apart to ponder holy things and pray for all souls.” 


Nor is it difficult to find here and there, in every 
time, some minister of such conspicuous quality 
that the whole life of a community may more and 
more take its tone from him. He may be in some 
little country church, quietly ministering all his life 
with simple devotion to simple folk. He may be 
the preacher in some great pulpit to which the 
multitudes look up. But equally it may be true 
that, when men come to look back upon the in- 
fluences which have laid hold of their lives, sweet- 
ened their thinking, given them a greater and stur- 
dier sense of duty for every day, lifted their hope 
and helped them to keep the perspective of their 
ambition true, they confess their gratitude, not 
to some statesman, not to the manipulator of 
business, not to the man who has made most 
money, but to the minister who has been to them 
the messenger of God. ‘The best spirits in every 
generation will always find the presence of such 
men congenial. They will thank God that the 
ministry does exist to hold up insistently the 
torch of the eternal things. 

198 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


Nor can the objection be made good that a man 
has good reason to stay out of the Church be- 
cause he holds that,—not the ministers now,—but 
the lay people, in the Church are unattractive. 
Rare is the man who would say that the spirit of his 
own mother is uncongenial to him; yet, as a matter 
of fact, most of the men in countries like ours 
who have had good mothers, have had mothers 
whose natures were sweetened and refined by the 
constant influence of the Christian Church. 
Through its worship and its fellowship, the 
Church has helped to create and sustain the de- 
votion of those who as builders of homes have 
given to their children the richest legacy of ideals 
and of character. If integrity and kindness and 
reverence and humility be the qualities that make 
people attractive, then the Church does fashion 
attractive people. It does not make them perfect. 
It does not lift all its members to a level which 
may not be reached and surpassed by individuals 
outside its ranks, for it starts with very various 
and unequal human material; but it does put into 
its people those elements of character and con- 
duct which make them more congenial to live with 
than they otherwise would have been, and more 
attractive than any other group which one is likely 
to find outside. 

In short, the talk which is sometimes heard to 
the effect that good fellowship and the real joy 


199 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


of living are found outside the Church rather 
than in it, is mere shallow ignorance. It is only 
a false estimate of reality which could ever say 
so, for the friendships which are formed within 
the Church lay hold, not merely of a part of a 
man, but of the whole of him, not of his trivial 
preference and of his passing moods, but of his 
deepest desires. As I look back over my own ex- 
perience, I believe the conviction which it has bred 
in me is typical of all who have been blessed with 
the privilege of the best the Church can give. I 
think of the friendships of school, and then of 
those of college, and some of them were fine and 
lasting; and then I think of the friendships which 
I formed among the men who were studying to- 
gether in the theological seminary; and then of 
the friendships of a parish, where the minister is 
thrown into constant association with men and 
women in loyalties which call out, not only the 
best which is already in them, but something bet- 
ter than their best. I do not believe that any 
imaginable other association could develop friend- 
ships so deep, so true, so altogether satisfying as 
those which are possible under the inspiration of 
the Church. The world is full, of course, of all 
sorts of so-called friendships. A man may call 
his best friends those with whom he likes to sit 
down and gamble, because gambling is for the 
moment the thing he most enjoys doing. He may 
200 


/ 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


count as his friends the men with whom he is asso- 
ciated in some hard-driving business, where he and 
they are tied together in the pursuit of their own 
profit. He may count as his friends the crowd 
with whom he mixes in some secret political deal. 
Or his friends may be that more or less floating 
group with whom he comes in pleasant but casual 
contact, the people he dines with, the men he talks 
with in his club, the ones he plays with on his holi- 
days. Out of all these friendships, of course, 
something beautiful may emerge, and will emerge 
if they arouse the actual human loyalty which 
makes people hold together because of their gen- 
uine regard for one another; but the trouble with 
most of the friendships formed on the basis of 
mere tastes or material interests is that they re- 
present no real coalescence of human personalities 
at all. They merely represent individuals linked 
together by certain artificial conjunctions at one 
small point of what ought to be their whole life; 
and if the whole life develops into nobler and 
larger interests, then the little thing that formerly 
represented the friendship becomes relatively in- 
significant and unsatisfying. But the friendships 
which are formed between men and women in the 
Christian Church do lay hold of the heights and 
depths and widenesses of their spirits. They draw 
them together by the compulsion of a loyalty so 
powerful and so transfusing that it melts them 
201 


SOM EnO PENG WAY Soa OrG Os 


with the glow of its high understanding. Such 
friendships have in them nothing to be grown 
away from, nothing unworthy or belittling at 
which developing experience could be ashamed; 
but, on the contrary, they bring a clean thorough- 
ness of regard and a confidence of expectation 
which lifts up and draws out the utmost that each 
has to give. There are few things so beautiful 
in the Bible as the story of the friendship of 
David and Jonathan, and that same sort of friend- 
ship, faithful, stimulating, free from any shadow 
of turning, is possible to men who learn to love 
each other in the Christian Church. 

2. [he second objection made to the Church by 
the man outside is that the Church has hypocrites 
in it. The fact that it seems so is the highest 
recommendation of the Church. 

For what makes some people in the Church 
seem to be hypocrites? It is because they are in 
an organiaztion which recognizedly has such high 
standards that the person who does not measure 
up to them is condemned even by the disinterested 
observer as no fit representative of the Church. 
The very act of judging the poor Church member 
for what he is involves the recognition of what 
he ought to be. 

Now manifestly no one wants the Church to be 
an institution for manufacturing hypocrites. But 
also it is clear that if the man who is now in the 

202 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


Church is called a hypocrite when he is no worse 
than a thousand outside who escape any singling 
out for blame, at least a standard has been set up 
by which men are measured by a more challenging 
insistence. Furthermore, the charge that such 
and such a member of the Church is a hypocrite 
may often come more from the ill-nature of the 
critic than from any genuine liability on the part 
of the person so criticized. A hypocrite, in that 
word’s real meaning of a conscious impostor, is 
a very rare person in the Church, as everybody 
knows. What the objector to the Church has in 
mind when he talks of hypocrites is people who 
blunder and come short, and whose shortcomings 
are the more evident because of the measuring- 
rod of the Church’s ideal against which they have 
had the courage to try to range themselves. In 
more cases than not, the critic himself is troubled 
by his own bad conscience. He knows that the 
Church represents an ideal which is difficult to 
live up to. He does not want himself to espouse 
that difficulty, and he plausibly confirms himself 
in his own decision to do nothing by mocking the 
failure of the man who has tried to do something 
and who has stumbled in his attempt. The real 
hypocrite is the critic himself, because he is trying 
so to manipulate ideas that he shall make a virtue 
out of his own moral inertia, and an excellence 
out of his own lazy refusal to try to be excellent 
203 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


at all. Fairly considered, this alleged objection 
to the Church on the ground that there are hypo- 
crites in it, does not deserve prolonged discussion. 
Nobody who is himself tremendously concerned 
about the moral or spiritual issues of life and sin- 
cerely desirous of- throwing his weight in with 
those forces which uphold the best, ever held aloof 
from the Church because of this drawback of the 
idea of hypocrites being in it. He is too busy 
trying to wield his own sword against what he 
knows to be the terribly real weapons of evil to 
stop superciliously to count some other man’s 
scars. The criticism of the shortcomings of the 
man who has enlisted as a soldier in the Church’s 
army, poor soldier though he be, generally comes 
from the man who does not want to enlist at all, 
but prefers the safe distance of a spectator to the 
melee of the spiritual combat; but the truth 1s that 
there may be more heroism in the man who, know- 
ing his weakness and unfitness, and knowing his 
liability to flinch before temptation and to be 
beaten to his knees by his besetting sin, yet goes 
on because God’s voice in his conscience will not 
let him utterly play the part of a coward or de- 
serter, than in all the complacent unwounded wit- 
nesses who hang upon the fringes of the battle to 
mark his fall. 

There is no need, then, of taking over-serious- 
ly the argument that there are hypocrites in the 

204. 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


Church. If the assertion that hypocrites are 
there is understood to mean,-—and this is the ut- 
most which usually the truth permits to be meant, 
—that the Church has in it many very imperfect 
warriors; if it means that people are called hypo- 
crites because they have deliberately adopted for 
their lives a high standard which will bring their 
failures into the light, instead of adopting no 
standard at all and so keeping their whole stand- 
ard indifferently in the dark; if it means that 
people are hypocrites because they aim higher 
than they can yet attain and follow a conscience 
that bids them do their best at moral tasks which 
they have not yet learned how to master;—then 
the more hypocrites we have the better. And a 
man might well choose to be called one as the 
price of trying blunderingly to climb higher, than 
very successfully to avoid being called one by stay- 
ing in the meanness in which he now is. 

3. A third objection made against the Church is 
that it does not accomplish anything. Someone 
may say, “Yes, I grant all that has just been said. 
I have no objection in the main against the kind 
of people who are in the Church. I admit that 
the talk about Church-members being unattractive 
and hypocritical is mostly fraud. The Church 
people are well-meaning enough. But what do 
they do? What is the actual value of the Church 
when it comes to accomplishment ?” 

205 


SO MEV OREN. WA YS 1 OmGages 


The answer to that depends upon what one is 
looking for? If by accomplishment one has in 
mind explosions of energy, blowing up like a vol- 
cano or rending like an earthquake, which break 
up the whole basis of our present life, shattering 
existing institutions and starting men rebuilding 
on a new plan, then it is obvious that the Church 
is not signalizing every day by some accomplish- 
ment. But it is also obvious that human life, if 
it had to be made over only by a process of vol- 
cano and earthquake, would hold out a wholly un- 
inviting prospect. 

Sometimes the Church, through its great re- 
presentatives, does lay hold of human affairs with 
sudden and drastic power. The mob in Thessa- 
lonica said of Paul and his companions, ‘These 
that have turned the world upside down are come 
hither also.’ But the real accomplishment of the 
Church is, as a rule, more like the accomplishment 
of climate. A change of climate will change the 
face of the earth. Geologists tell us that a very 
slight average decrease in the annual temperature 
over the northern part of the globe, perhaps not 
more than eight or ten degrees Fahrenheit, would 
suffice to bring on another glacial age. Little by 
little every winter the ice cap in the polar regions 
would accumulate. Little by little the snows 
would deepen and the glaciers form on the high 
mountains. Less and less would the warmth of the 

206 


WHY: BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


summer be sufficient to melt the ice and snow 
which the winters had left, and so by scarcely per- 
ceptible but sure degrees the relentless march of 
the glaciers would begin again until vast regions 
of the earth now fertile and inhabited would be 
locked as once they were in the frozen embrace of 
cold and death. In the same way, if the Church 
should vanish from the earth, the spiritual climate 
would begin to change. Men would not notice it 
at first. They would think that the sun shone 
and that life went upon its way quite as it had 
done yeserday. But little by little the glow of 
those finer human emotions under which the most 
fragrant thoughts and actions of our race develop 
would begin to wane before the increasing pre- 
ponderance of the cruelty, the selfishness, and the 
hard materialism which always gather round the 
arctic fringes of our human nature. Slowly these 
things would begin their march across the prov- 
inces of life, and all the fields of human activity 
would begin to grow bleak and desolate in the 
deepening spiritual cold. 

It is often only the lack of the most precious 
elements of life which bring men to the acute con- 
sciousness of their value. As the days go on with 
their familiar warmth of the sun, with their tem- 
perate seasons and the long months of bright skies 
and fertile earth, it is easy to take for granted 
and to estimate indifferently the priceless boon of 

207 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


genial weather. So a civilization accustomed to 
the presence in its midst of the Christian Church, 
with the steady warmth of its constant influence, 
and with its power to ameliorate the tempers of 
men and to quicken into fruitfulness the seeds of 
nobler thought, takes for granted the conditions 
to which it is accustomed, and does not always 
specifically recognize that it is to the Church in 
large measure that it owes them. Yet it would 
be a grievous fault that men should have to lose 
the thing they prize before they should know how 
much they prize it. A short while ago, in this 
spring of 1924, a cable dispatch from England 
carried the report that in England this year there 
had been an extraordinary number of suicides, 
which by many observers was attributed to the 
fact that it had been a winter of singular cloudi- 
ness and gloom, with long successions of days in 
which there had been no glimpse of the sun. The 
wretched drabness of the grey weather weighed 
with its intolerable depression upon men’s spirits, 
and for some of them actually made life seem 
no longer worth living. If the Church should 
pass out of the life of our civilization, the spirit- 
ual effect would be similar. Then, when perhaps 
it was too late, multitudes of people would realize 
that life had lost its warmth and light and color, 
which alone can make it desirable for any sensi- 
tive soul. 
208 





WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


And as we take this metaphor of climate to 
illustrate the influence of the Church, it needs to 
be remembered that that influence is exerted not 
only upon individuals but upon that group mind 
and will out of which the destinies of nations may 
be fashioned. Nothing is being more clearly re- 
cognized by thoughtful men than that something 
more than machinery of political plans and treat- 
ies and formal negotiations will be needed to save 
the world from the forces of war and disruption 
which threaten. There must be a new spirit in the 
hearts of the peoples. There must be some great 
power of good-will, shining as steadily as the sun, 
which can break through the fogs of hate and 
suspicion, lift men out of their depression and en- 
courage them for braver constructive tasks to- 
gether. Ina recent volume entitled ‘Realities and 
Shams,” Professor L. P. Jacks, the Editor of the 
Hibbert Journal, has said of those plans such as 
the League of Nations which have of late been 
fashioned to try to secure order and peace in our 
world: 


“At first sight the problem appears to consist in 
finding the right scheme, or the right idea, by the 
application of which this or that is to be mended. 
The importance of that I do not belittle—-nobody 
in his senses would dream of belittling it; but be- 
hind it lies the far greater problem of finding the 
power to carry out the scheme you have devised, 

209 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


to give effect to the idea you have propounded. I 
am not referring to political power as it is repre- 
sented by masses of voters, by measures passed 
into law, by armies, and by policemen. I mean 
moral power, as it is represented by the steadiness 
of the public in the pursuit of its aims, by contin- 
uity of effort, by belief in principles, by mutual 
loyalty, by strict adhesion both to the form and 
the spirit of a pledge, and by the refusal to be led 
away by cant. This is the kind of power you 
want, and without which your scheme of recon- 
struction will never be carried out.” 


And further he wrote: 


“The likelihood that a good idea will take root 
and fructify as a social force is ultimately depend- 
ent on the good temper of the community to which 
it is addressed. Jn human society, improvement 
that is worth the name is never effected by one set 
of people forcing their ideas down the throats of 
another set. All improvement takes place by con- 
sent, by men seeing eye to eye, believing in com- 
mon and acting together in good faith and mutual 
loyalty for the given end. This loyal and con- 
tinuous consent can never be obtained, on a scale 
large enough to be effective, except in communities 
whose members, as human beings, are on good 
terms with one another, respect one another, trust 
one another, believe in each other’s good inten- 
tions, and take a generous view of each other’s 
merits and demerits.” 


It is quite true that the Christian Church, as it 
210 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


now appears in the world, does not obviously pre- 
sent a power able to create that human good-will 
which Principal Jacks has pointed out to be our 
sorest need. The divisions within the Church it- 
self, the slow imagination of some of her leaders, 
and the failure of many of her people to interpret 
her opportunity in terms of world regeneration, 
wound the power which the Church ought to pos- 
sess; but notwithstanding that, what other force 
in society has potentialities comparable to the 
Church in this matter? If the Church cannot fur- 
nish the good-will which our society needs, we 
shall look far to discover any other institution 
which can furnish it. 

And if we consider the facts, we shall recognize 
that the Church, when men turn to it with an ex- 
pectant challenge, does already furnish the most 
hopeful influence which at this moment is in opera- 
tion. Men who try to reach the public opinion of 
the American people for a larger measure of inter- 
national cooperation—the men, for example, who 
go out to interpret the World Court or the League 
of Nations—repeatedly discover that the most 
effective influences for bringing together the rep- 
resentative groups of citizens, through which a 
message can be given to the people who count 
most, and by which the public opinion can be regis- 
tered, are the groups of local ministers. Cham- 
bers of Commerce and other business organiza- 

211 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


tions may be mildly interested; but usually they 
have no aptitude for bringing people together ex- 
cept for more or less technical matters of business 
concern. It is through the representatives of the 
Church that the mind and conscience of the people 
can be reached> The growing activity in the 
United States of the Federal Council of Churches 
is the brightest example of what the Church as a 
whole can do. The calling of the Conference on 
Limitation of Armaments in Washington in 1921 
was due in no small measure to the insistent desire 
of Church people which the Federal Council 
brought to a focus of expression in this matter. 
It is significant that Church bodies of every sort 
“1 the United States have been almost overwhelm- 
ingly in favor of constructive efforts for world 
peace, and the hope that we may move forward 
to success rests in large measure upon the driving 
power of that idealism which the Church repre- 
sents. 

Therefore it is time that we should turn from 
the negative aspect of the subject of this chapter 
to the positive one. The objections to the Church 
may be recognized, but for the thoughtful spirit 
they can also be removed. Notwithstanding its 
imperfect members and notwithstanding the weak- 
ening caused by its divisions, the Christian Church 
represents the ‘nstrumentality in the world today 
through which the Holy Spirit of God may work 

212 





y 
4 
A 
\ 


WHY BELONGS TO THE: CHURCH ¢ 


for the nobler development of our human life, and 
as such it challenges the allegiance of men and 
women of high purpose and good-will. 


Iil 


The Church can become this instrumentality for 
the operation of the Holy Spirit because of such 
facts as these. 

1. In the first place, because the Church assures 
the nurture of the ideal. It accustoms, not only 
adults, but what is even more important, boys and 
girls, to the thought of God’s purpose in Jesus 
Christ as the standard against which their lives 
must be measured. It surrounds them with the 
atmosphere of moral and spiritual expectation, by 
the unconscious breathing of which their whole 
growth will be affected. 

What this means, and what the reverse of it 
may mean, can be readily apparent to any observer 
of contemporary life. There is at the present time 
an appalling amount of juvenile delinquency. ‘The 
overwhelming majority of the criminals who are 
sent to prison from our great American cities are 
very young men. That on the face of it is a con- 
demnation of the Church. As a matter of fact, 
it does not represent a failure of the Church except 
as it represents the very imperfect extension of 
that influence which is of priceless value whenever 

213 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


it is brought to bear,—for it has been repeatedly 
testified by judges of courts, by social workers, and 
others who have investigated the facts as to moral 
delinquency, especially among American youth, 
that practically always the boys and girls and 
young men and women who come into the courts 
are discovered to have been those who have never 
been brought up in any Church or Sunday-school. 
They have passed through no nursery of charac- 
ter. They have grown up without any knowledge 
of those religious expectations which develop high 
self-respect. On the other hand, those boys and 
girls who have been taught under religious influ- 
ences have learned that there is such a thing as a 
moral code to which they are expected to be true. 
They have been given the sense of accountability 
to something high and steadying, and best of all, 
in Christian Sunday-schools and Churches they 
have been made familiar with the personality of 
Jesus Christ, so that for them it is never again 
quite possible to have a mean, unclean, and selfish 
life go unrebuked by the ideal which He repre- 
sents. 

‘It is easy to recognize also that the instinctive 
judgment of the world perceives in the Christian 
Church a sensitiveness to high responsibilities 
which makes the forces working for betterment in 
society always turn to the Church for help. Much 
is said in our day of the fact that many of the lead- 


214 





WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


ers in social work seem to have broken their con- 
tact with the Church; but it is equally true that 
when the personal history of those same social 
workers can be traced, it is repeatedly made evi- 
dent that the source of their practical idealism 
leads back to the inspiration which they received, 
either personally or through inheritance, from the 
Church; and it is further a fact that whenever an 
unselfish cause is to be set forward, it is to the 
Church that people turn for its encouragement. 
The Christian minister immediately looms as a 
likely ally before the hopeful imagination of every 
promoter of a new crusade. There is scarcely a 
Sunday in the year which he is not solemnly im- 
portuned to dedicate to some particular cause, un- 
til—if he adopt them all—the entire church cal- 
endar would appear as one continuous propaganda 
of specific social ameliorations. According to the 
requests which come, there would be a ‘“Tubercu- 
losis Sunday,” a “Child Labor Sunday,” a “Red 
Cross Sunday,” a ‘Near East Relief Sunday,” a 
“Disabled Veterans Sunday,’ a ‘World Court 
Sunday,” and all sorts of others, as variegated as 
the colors in Joseph’s coat. Why do all these 
causes and a host of others backed by earnest 
people turn to the Church and ask the Church to 
help them by the message of its pulpit and the 
money of its people? It is because they know 
that there is a natural kinship between the spirit 
215 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


of the Church and the spirit of any and every sort 
of selfish endeavor, and though their particular 
suggestion as to the way in which the Church can 
help may often be crude and impractical, their 
sense that the people who make up the Church are 
the ones from whom help will most surely come is 
profoundly true. If any one questions that fact, 
all he needs to do is to take the list of contributors 
to the great charities and the outstanding agencies 
for social betterment, whether these involve the 
special and dramatic appeals such as were made 
in the time of war, or the steady and routine inter- 
est of ordinary days, and compare the list of giv- 
ers with a list of members of the Church. He 
will find that any organization which had to do 
without that part of its support which traces back 
to the inspiration of the Church would very soon 
be dead and buried. 

Furthermore, there is a notable fact concerning 
the Church which superficial appearances may dis- 
guise. According to these appearances, the Church 
often seems to have very little movement in its 
thought. With the slow passing of the years, there 
drifts into the channels of the Church’s life the 
impalpable but slowly stifling dust from the com- 
mon and familiar influences of its world. ‘The 
waters of that quickening spirit which should flow 
through the Church may become blocked into little 
pools, shallow, stale, and even corrupt; but the 

216 





WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


mighty fact is that, though the Church in tem- 
porary and superficial aspect may thus often seem 
to represent the spent forces of conservatism and 
stagnation, nevertheless it is forever within the 
ground which the Church possesses that those great 
fountains lie out of which the flooding waters 
again and again will break. Far down beneath 
even the most dusty and arid forgetfulness of any 
generation, still within the Church’s profounder 
consciousness are the wells of the remembrance of 
the words of Jesus,—and the mystic well of the 
sacrament of remembrance of His death. In those 
mighty moments of history, when the great souls 
come with that intuition which goes back to the 
eternal springs of the thought of Jesus, they strike 
the ground of the Church’s life, as Moses struck 
the rock in the wilderness, and the waters of the 
recovered meaning of the Lord leap again into the 
sunlight and flow in streams that refresh all the 
parched provinces of men’s life. That was true, 
for example, when in the midst of the corruption 
of the later Renaissance, Savonarola arose in 
Florence. At the time when the Church was being 
conformed to the paganism of his world, he 
brought back to it the transforming thought of the 
moral imperatives of Christ. In the next century 
Martin Luther did the same thing with an even 
surer power. It mattered not that all the organ- 
ized authority of the Church and Empire too were 


2177 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


set against him. Standing before Charles the 
Fifth, the princes, the cardinals, and the legate 
of the Pope, he concluded his statement with those 
greatly simple words: “Here I stand. I can do 
no otherwise. God help me. Amen.’ What he 
accomplished for the Reformation, no power of 
any single man could have accomplished. His 
work was possible because through him there 
issued again the living waters of the power of 
Christ, the channels of which may be impeded, but 
can never be destroyed. 

In those two problems which most concern the 
social conscience of our day, the consensus of 
thoughtful men more and more points out this 
power of the resurgent ideals of Jesus as the indis- 
pensable influence by which good men can be in- 
spired to accomplish what they desire. I mean, 
on the one hand, the problem of working out some 
genuine principle of codperation in our economic 
order, and, in the second place, the development 
of a new spirit as between the nations which may 
deliver civilization from the threatening annihila- 
tion of war. In his notable book on The Recon- 
struction of Religion: A Sociological View, Pro- 
fessor Ellwood has written: “There is no hope of 
the realization of a social life dominated by love 
without Jesus, for there is no one to whom the 
world would turn for such a vision if his leader- 
ship were denied. And in making himself the 

218 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


moral and social leader of mankind he has surely 
become the redeemer and savior of his fellow- 
men.” And again he says, “The world is perish- 
ing for lack of knowledge of the way in which 
human beings should live together. The Church 
holds one key to this knowledge, the social ideals 
of Jesus; and social science the other.’ That is 
to say, he recognizes, as other profound thinkers 
of the day are doing, that the whole question of 
our economic readjustment in the way which shall 
make for real satisfaction of human spirits comes 
back in the last analysis to religion. There can 
be no adequate transformation of the machinery 
of our social order without a sufficient motive, and 
the only motive powerful enough to fire men’s im- 
aginations and to claim their will is the strength 
of that consecration which Jesus commands. 

That “the world is perishing for lack of knowl- 
edge of the way in which human beings should live 
together” all earnestly thoughtful people would 
agree. And if there are some who believe very 
readily that “‘social science” holds one key to this 
knowledge but are slow to believe that the organ- 
ized Church holds another indispensable key, the 
representation of the truth may well rest in these 
fine words which Jane Addams has written in her 
“Twenty Years at Hull House”: 


“One Sunday morning I received the rite of 
219 


SOME OPEN WAYS /1D0 GOwm 


baptism and became a member of the Presbyterian 
church in the village. At this time there was cer- 
tainly no outside pressure pushing me towards 
such a decision, and at twenty-five one does not 
ordinarily take such a step from a mere desire to 
conform. While I was not conscious of any emo- 
tional ‘conversion,’ I took upon myself the outward 
expressions of the religious life with all humility 
and sincerity. It was doubtless true that I was 


“Weary of myself and sick of asking 
What I am and what I ought to be,’” 


and that various cherished safeguards and claims 
to self-dependence had been broken into by many 
piteous failures. But certainly I had been brought 
to the conclusion that ‘sincerely to give up one’s 
conceit or hope of being good in one’s own right 
is the only door to the Universe’s deeper reaches.’ 

There was also growing within me an al- 
most passionate devotion to the ideals of democ- 
racy, and when in all history had these ideals been 
so thrillingly expressed as when the faith of the 
fisherman and the slave had been boldly opposed 
to the accepted moral belief that the well-being 
of a privileged few might justly be built upon the 
ignorance and sacrifice of the many? Who was I, 
with my dreams of universal fellowship, that I did 
not identify myself with the institutional state- 
ment of this belief, as it stood in the little village 
in which I was born, and without which testimony 
in each remote hamlet of Christendom it would be 
so easy for the world to slip back into the doctrines 
of selection and aristocracy?’ 

220 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


And if the Church is needed for its nurture of 
those ideals which may redeem our economic or- 
der, so it is needed also to nurture those ideals 
which alone can deliver our world from interna- 
tional strife. To my own memory the truth is 
symbolized by a scene to which my thoughts go 
back in Northern France. There outside a broken 
wall at the beginning of a long plain which 
stretched away to hills on the western horizon, 
day by day the broken bodies of men killed at the 
front or dying in hospitals were brought to be 
buried. Not far from the wall was a garden 
which some French peasant had planted in the 
spring. Between the wall and the garden grew 
the increasing files of hasty graves. Day by day 
as the bodies were brought, new graves were dug, 
and the newest of them reached out nearer and 
nearer to the garden. At last they invaded it and 
slowly swallowed it up. It was as though death 
itself were creeping on, drawing down into its in- 
exorable maw, not only the life of today but the 
very sustenance and promise of the life of tomor- 
row. And then from that place with its raw earth 
and the lengthening graves and the sombre twilight 
falling across the plain, I would turn my eyes and 
look where to the east, over the walls and roofs 
of the ancient town, rose the grey facade of the 
old cathedral which was builded before some of 
the nations that were in the war were born. On 

221 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


the stone front of it was carved a great crucifix. 
Silently there, where the dawn would rise behind 
it, it brooded over the long tragedy of the war. 
In that figure, with its infinite compassion, with its 
ideals of life undefeated by death and by the cross 
of human sin, is the promise of the ultimate tri- 
umph. And through men and women nurtured 
by the Church in His ideals, there must come the 
strength for the better world that is to be. 

2. In the second place, the Church adds to the 
nurture of the ideal the power of a proven confi- 
dence. 

The trouble with many of the efforts at reform 
in our day is that they rest on no deep foundation. 
They depend upon the personal enthusiasm of 
little groups of people who have conceived some 
new idea and set out self-sufficiently to realize it. 
When discouragements thicken and their own best 
energies seem to be set at naught, they have noth- 
ing to fall back upon. They have not linked their 
staccato efforts with that mightier movement of 
the long purposes of God, in relation to which our 
individual postponements are relieved of their dis- 
may. 

The mind which has been tutored by Christian- 
ity reads history with a perspective which finds 
in it the evidence of something stronger and 
sturdier than our own human efforts. It sees that 
one increasing purpose through the ages runs. It 

222 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


believes that there is a power of God with which 
one day may be as a thousand years and a thou- 
sand years as one day. It perceives that the 
supreme successes have not always been those 
which were marked by hasty effects. It perceives 
that the sufferings and martyrdoms of heroes have 
often been more potent than the acts of conquer- 
ors in bringing about the triumph of the ideals by 
which they live and for which they are willing to 
die. In Jesus Christ Himself many generations 
of Christians have found, not only their thought 
of what might be an ideal for life, but their brave 
confidence that despite all temporary disaster and 
loss, the real forces of the universe are on the side 
of that faith and devotion which He lifted up. 
When John Huss was being led to his death at the 
stake by the judgment of the Council of Constance, 
he said, addressing his executioners, “The Lord 
Jesus Christ, my Redeemer, was bound with a 
harder chain, and I, a miserable sinner, am not 
afraid to bear this one, bound as I am for His 
Name’s sake.’ Then he repeated, “In the same 
truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught, 
and preached, drawing upon the sayings and posi- 
tions of the holy doctors, I am ready to die to- 
day.” And he wrote in one of his letters that 
after his death God would raise up braver men to 
‘Jose their lives for the truth of the Lord Jesus.” 
The world today does not have its stake and fagot 
223 


SOME OPEN WAYS TO GOD 


and fire for the prophet of spiritual truth. Never- 
theless, even now it has its ordeal of ridicule for 
the idealist, of scorn and rejection for the man 
who goes ahead of his time; and if today, as in 
other generations, the creative and pioneering 
spirits are to be brave to carry out their lonely 
task, they will need exactly what John Huss found, 
and what the real genius of the Church can give,— 
namely, the sense of the present as still in the 
hands of God because the past is seen to have been 
directed by His unhurrying yet most sure will. 
As we look upon our contemporary existence, 
we find in it much of which no one can be proud. 
Yet as we compare it with the past, we know that 
human life has moved on and up out of the valley 
of one old iniquity after another toward the higher 
levels which rose ahead. In that progress we have 
left human sacrifice behind. We have left slavery 
behind; and the conscience at least of the vanguard 
is beginning to leave behind and to repudiate the 
‘dea that war is an inevitable and necessary thing. 
The life of the common man, in the freedom of 
his body and in the liberty of his mind, in his 
chance to hope for his share of opportunity for 
himself and for his children, is an infinitely fairer 
thing than it was in the centuries gone. The ad- 
mitted injustices and inequalities of our modern 
social order cannot obscure the greater fact that 
the lot of the average citizen in the free nations 
224. 





WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


of the world today represents, if not Paradise, at 
least a very high and hopeful circle of Purgatory 
in comparison with the Hell of wretchedness and 
subjection in which the unregarded multitudes once 
were kept. 


“Some call it Evolution, 


And others call it God.”’ 


The Christian Church does call it God. It believes 
that the Holy Purpose, slowly controlling the un- 
ruly wills and affections of sinful men, has been 
leading the human family on to better things, and 
because it thus believes that the progress made in 
the past has been, not blundering chance, but the 
result of the working of a Spirit whom the spirit 
of man can trust, it has the braver confidence to 
lay hold of the future because the foundation of 
that faith is strong beneath its feet. 

3. In the third place, the Church can be the in- 
strumentality for the Holy Spirit because it gives a 
solidarity to strength. “A solidarity!’ some may 
exclaim incredulously. “Where is any solidarity 
in the Church, divided as it now is? Is not that 
the very thing which the actual facts of organized 
Christianity make a mock of ?” 

If we look at certain appearances and only at 
these, then the answer is Yes; but there is a deeper 
fact beneath the appearances. As a group made 

225 


SiO. MOE O-RsEING Wi ALY Sot OG ae 


up of representatives of the Church of England 
on the one hand and of represéntatives of the 
Free Churches on the other, meeting together in 
England with reference to the proposed World 
Conference on Faith and Order, said recently in a 
statement which they jointly subscribed: 


“As there is but one Christ, and one Life in 
Him, so there is and can be but one Church. 

“This one Church consists of all those who 
have been, or are being, redeemed by and in 
Christ, whether in this world or in the world be- 
yond our sight, but it has its expression in this 
world in a visible form. Yet the Church, as in- 
visible and as visible, is, by virtue of its one life in 
Christ, one. 

“The true relation of the Church and local 
Churches is that which is described in the New 
Testament——namely, that the Churches are the 
local representatives of the One Church. The 
actual situation brought about in the course of his- 
tory in which there are different and even rival 
denominational Churches independent of each 
other and existing together in the same locality, 
whatever justification arising out of historical cir- 
cumstances may be claimed for these temporary 
separations, cannot be regarded as in accordance 
with the Purpose of Christ, and every endeavor 
ought to be made to restore the true position as 
set forth in the New Testament.” 


These words express a realization, now wide- 
spread among thoughtful Christian people, that 
226 


Wirt bo OUN Gun LO Cr He CEURCE ¢ 


the present discordant division of the ideal Church 
into many rival denominations represents a grave 
forfeiture of the Church’s highest life and power. 
Earnest efforts are being made in several quarters 
to draw together bodies of sundered Christians 
into larger fellowships. The recent movement 
towards union of the Methodist and Presbyterian 
Churches in Canada, now nearly consummated, is 
one example. The proposed World Conference 
on Faith and Order is a far more ambitious ef- 
fort toward the same ideal of Christian solidarity. 
Through slow and patient preparation, it has now 
come to pass that many Christian communions, all 
over the world, have appointed commissions who 
are definitely arranging the details of the Confer- 
ence to be held within the next two or three years, 
at which representatives from almost all the im- 
portant bodies of the Christian world will meet 
together frankly to face their differences and to 
try to find the way toward an effective reunion of 
Christendom. 

But meanwhile, even with the many Christian 
divisions, there is already a rapidly developing 
coéperation of strength between Christian com- 
munions in actual service. Here in America par- 
ticularly, there have been notable instances of the 
way in which a common Christian conscience and 
will, overpassing all denominational bounds, can 
be mobilized with great power in issues which af- 

227 


SOME 0 PAB -Witol STO G Gao 


' 


fect the moral ideals of the whole people. Un- 
questionably, the fight against the commercialized 
liguor traffic would never have gone forward in 
any such formidable fashion as has been the case 
except for the strength which was recruited from 
numberless congregations of Christian people who, 
notwithstanding the fact that they had denomina- 
tional differences, were united in one resolution to 
strike down the organized evil which was respon- 
sible for so much degradation and misery in the 
nation. ‘The issue of the very vast social experi- 
ment which has culminated in the enactment of 
constitutional prohibition in the United States is 
not yet fully determined; but it is true that if at 
last the elimination of alcoholic drink as a cause 
of social misery does plainly result, it will have 
been through the steady pressure of a sentiment 
aroused in the Churches that the achievement thus 
is reached. 

In those matters of industrial reorganization 
which lead to a larger human justice, the influence 
of the Church has also made itself weightily felt. 
The Interchurch World Movement, in the years 


after the war, was promoted with an enthusiasm _ 


which outran its practical ways and means, and its 

far-flung effort to rouse simultaneously the thought 

and coGrdinated energies of all the Protestant 

Churches of America failed to do what it had 

planned to do. Nevertheless, in such fragmentary 
228 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


accomplishment at least as its report on the Steel 
Strike, it brought Christian industrial demands 
into expression, and, like old Bishop Latimer, it 
lit a candle which is not easily put out. Early in 
1923, Judge Gary, the head of the United States 
Steel Corporation, declared the eight-hour day in 
the steel industry to be economically impossible. 
The reply published throughout the country by 
the Federal Council of Churches had a large part 
in summoning up a public opinion which insisted 
that the thing which Judge Gary had said to be 
impossible must, nevertheless, be attempted; and 
in response to the public opinion in which the 
Church’s voice had a major share, the United 
States Steel Corporation did adopt the eight-hour 
day, which it had already admitted to be humanly 
desirable, and has since admitted to have proved 
economically practicable also. | 

In 1921, when the question was first broached 
in the United States Congress of having an inter- 
national conference on disarmament convened by 
the President of the United States, the first indi- 
cations were that there was by no means a fervent 
and preponderant interest in this suggestion either 
in Congress or in the administration. There was 
needed the aroused opinion of the nation, and this 
opinion the Churches did proceed to arouse and 
to focus into expression. As Dr. John H. Finley 
wrote at that time, ‘‘This far-reaching proposal 

229 


S OMEWOIRITE IN: SW ASE Oi Gaone 


was made possible by the nation-wide tide of pub- 
lic opinion which has supported the calling of the 
Conference and which has made it as clear as day- 
light that the people everywhere are not only ready 
for a thorough-going reduction of armament, but 
insistent that it should no longer be delayed. In 
developing and expressing this public sentiment, 
the churches have played a memorable part. Even 
the most critical could not declare that on this 
issue they have been either indifferent or ineffec- 
tive. In fact, it is not too much to say that they 
have been one of the decisive factors in setting 
our nation before the world as the outspoken ad- 
vocate of the abandonment of the policy of com- 
petitive armament.” And as an evidence that Dr. 
Finley did not overstate the facts, consider these 
letters, written in answer to an inquiry, by Senator 
Hitchcock, and by Senator Borah, the author of 
the original resolution in the Senate which first 
suggested the Conference. They wrote: 


“IT have no hesitation in saying that the out- 
spoken attitude of the churches of the United 
States on the subject of disarmament has been an 
important influence in bringing the matter to a 
head. I have no means of measuring the force of 
this church influence, and I cannot even tell you 
how many churches accepted the suggestion of 
those who originated the idea for action, but inas- 
much as all the expressions from churches were of 
the same purport and there was no disagreement 

230 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


in church organizations, I am inclined to think 
that there has been a general assumption that all 
religious organizations favored disarmament, and 
this fact has had an important influence. 


“GM. Hitchcock.’ 


“T have no doubt that the expression of opinion 
of the Christian congregations in America and the 
Jewish synagogues upon this important subject re- 
sulted in great good and helped most substantially 
to advance the cause. 

“T was greatly pleased when this action was 
taken, and too much credit cannot be given the 
churches for the part which they took. 

“William E. Borah.” 


The Conference on Limitation of Armament 
was, of course, only one step in the direction 
of international conciliation. Far greater ques- 
tions than any which that Conference grappled 
with need to be settled if the world is to have done 
with war. Those questions are still before us— 
questions involving for America decision as to 
whether this nation shall enter the World Court, 
whether it shall associate itself with the League of 
Nations, and whether it shall find and follow other 
deliberate and constructive policies for the crea- 
tion of world conditions on which peace can be 
reasonably built. To face these questions effec- 
tively will require both imagination and conscience. 
No thoughtful observer of American conditions 

231 


SOME); OREN WAYS: TO°> GO) 


can fail to see that the source from which this im- 
agination and conscience is most apt to come is 
the opinion of the Church. 

It has often been charged against Protestantism 
particularly that it is so essentially divisive that 
it can never act as‘an effective and coherent Chris- 
tian force; but in recent years the Federal Coun- 
cil of the Churches has gone far to reverse that 
belief. It has become the increasingly dependable 
and effective medium through which the Churches 
can reach a common consciousness and express a 
common will. Its research department has been 
of extraordinary value in gathering with swift au- 
thority and making public through its widespread 
channels information about great public issues in 
relation to which individual ministers and congre- 
gations would have had great difficulty in finding 
the truth. Through its various commissions, it has 
given the progressively educated Christian opinion 
representative agencies through which to express 
itself with regard to industrial justice, law enforce- 
ment, Christian race relationships, and world 
peace. Furthermore, it has had extraordinary 
success in certain instances in relating the moral 
opinion of Protestantism to that of the Roman 
Catholic Church and in bringing these unitedly to 
bear upon the great issues of public concern in 
which the Christian conscience was agreed. 

Thus, though it is true that the divisions in 

232 


WHY BELONG TO THE CHURCH? 


Christianity do sadly hamper its effectiveness in 
service and do sometimes poison its spirit, yet it 
is not true that there lack the signs of a growing 
codperation which men of good-will can foster. 
There may be enough, on the one hand, to give a 
specious plausibility to the man who seizes upon 
the divisions in the Church as an excuse why he 
will not work within the Christian organization; 
but there is plenty of fact, on the other hand, to 
hold out its invitation to the man of genuine pur- 
pose who wants to find the way in which he can 
make his strength count in an increasing power of 
human association for the ideals of Jesus. 

From such men, the Church by what it is today, 
and for the sake of what it can be made tomor- 
row, has a right to claim a loyalty, discriminating 
yet positive, which might well express its desire for 
the Church in these words of the Book of Common 
Prayer, “Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it 
is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, 
reform it; where it is right, establish it; where it is 
divided, reunite it... . For the sake of Jesus 
Christ.” 


IV 


“For the sake of Jesus Christ.” That is why 
the Church has the right to call the best of human 
emotion and human will into its ranks. ‘There 


233 


SOME VO REIN Wels ORG Oa 


are multitudes of people today, not yet in any 
ecclesiastical organization, who feel an instinctive 
reverence for Jesus Christ. They would like to 
have His Spirit prevail in our world. They be- 
lieve that if He could go about among us, with 
His great sense of-eternal values, with His inter- 
pretation of all life in terms of the growth of 
human souls toward their sonship in the family of 
God, with His holiness, His gentleness, His king- 
liness of service, this business of our daily living, 
so often poor and mean, would become a higher, 
holier, and infinitely more happy thing. Yet Jesus 
Christ as a visible presence is no longer here. Is | 
He therefore to be only a wistful memory of what 
was long ago, and effectively is no more? If the 
Church had no glorious meaning, that sorry con- 
clusion might be true: but the loyalty of men and 
women now can fill the Christian Church with that 
meaning which makes it the Body of Christ, as 
from the beginning it has been meant to be. Back 
of all the little divisions, higher than all temporary 
misunderstandings, rises the imperishable beauty 
of that true Church into which all strong souls can 
enter. It is the fellowship of those, whatever be 
their name, who are trying with increasing codper- 
ation to bring the Spirit of Jesus to bear upon 
their world. It is the mystic body, made up of a 
unity of innumerable lives, which shall be today the 
lips to speak the truth of Christ, the feet to go 


234 


Witty BE LONGO PHESCHUORCE!: 


upon His ways of service, the hands to build His 
ideals into fact. To lift one’s own life and to lift 
the life of congregations into that high conscious- 
ness of the Church, is the noblest task which faces 
all aspiring souls in our world today. 


235 





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